LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chapl Copyright No. 

Shelf 5 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE 

AGNOSTIC GOSPEL: 

A REVIEW OF HUXLEY ON THE BIBLE 

WITH 

RELATED ESSAYS 



/ 



By HENRY WEBSTER PARKER, 

LATE PEOF. NAT. SCIENCE, IOWA COLL. 

Author of 

'The Spirit of Beauty: Essays Scientific and JEJsthetic" etc. 



m 5 



JOHN B ALDEN, PUBLISHER, 

1806. 



Copyright, 

BY 

HENRY WEBSTER PARKER. 



PUBLISHER'S NOTICE. 



From D. S. Gregory, D.D., LL.D., ex-Pres. Lake Forest University, 
Managing Editor of the Standard Dictionary: 

"I have examined with some care the manuscript of Dr. Henry W. 
Parker's 'The Agnostic Gospel, with Related Essays. 1 I know of no 
one in this country who has such special qualifications for dealing 
with the subjects. He is thoroughly acquainted with the scientific 
and philosophical theories and points involved; is keenly discriminat- 
ing and incisive in his critical thinking and reasoning; appreciative 
and sympathetic in spirit, and genially humorous in tone and temper. 
To all this he adds literary quality of high order, exhibited in the 
pungency and raciness of his style and the breadth of allusion and 
illustration." 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 

THE SPIRIT OF BEAUTY. 

The Spirit of Beauty: Essays, Scientific and ^Esthetic. By Prof. 
Henry W. Parker. Large 12mo. cloth, 75 cents. Third edition. 
New York: John B. Alden, 10 Vandewater Street. 1895. 

" I have already read a large part of the book, and I have been de- 
lighted, instructed, and morally animated. It gives rich, delicate, 
and robust expression to a various knowledge, as well as to fine, de- 
vout, and far-reaching thought. I have not for long taken up a book 
which has interested me so immediately, or refreshed me so abun- 
dantly."— Rev. R. S. Storrs, D.D., Brooklyn, N. Y. 

"An admirable treatment of a widely related theme. The book is 
none the less profound for being so pungent."— Ex-Pres Julius H. 
Seelye, LL.D., Amherst College. 

" I appreciate it highly. The incisive but graceful style is worthy 
the pure and elevating sentiments and conceptions which it incul- 
cates. I feel a singular sympathy with its way of thinking, and shall 
embrace every proper opportunity to call attention to a book so 
brilliant and so noble in its aims."— Prof. Alexander Winchell, 
LL.D., Michigan University. 

"I know Prof. Parker chiefly by the articles he gave me for the 
North American Review. These gave me the highest regard for him 
as an original, sound, and deep thinker. I have repeatedly character- 
ized his article on the natural theology of art as the best paper that 
passed under my hands duriug the ten or eleven years of my editor- 
ship. My belief is that Mr. Parker's aesthetic capacity and culture 
are unsurpassed among us."— Prop. A. P. Peabody, D.D., of Harvard 
University. 

"The author is a naturalist and is quite familiar with the facts and 
views of Darwin, Spencer, and Haeckel; and, whatever restrictions he 
may make upon them, he has made as a man who has studied the 
subject from the inside. The observation of facts in the organic and 
inorganic worlds is good."— Science. 

"In Prof. Henry W. Parker's volume we have just one of those 
protests against the recent schools of philosophical sensationalism 
which are sure to be raised, sooner or later, in the name of aesthetics. 
We welcome everything that will bring intelligent people to see that 
it is not dogmatic orthodoxy alone or the limited and perhaps narrow 
interests of sectarian religion which are assailed by this philosophy, 
but the whole spiritual theory of man,"— N. Y. Independent. 



CONTENTS. 



I. 

Huxley and Hebrew Tradition.— His Genesis as Con- 
troversialist, 1 — His Humor and Combativeness, 3 — The 
Automatism Lecture, 6 — Sensational Science, 8 — The 
Method of Zadig, 10— Fighting Windmills, 11— Mis- 
representation of the Doctrine of Creation, 12 — The 
Milton Lecture, 14 — The Creation of Vegetal Life, 
17 — The Creation of Animal Life, 19 — Gladstone and 
Genesis, 21 — The Creation of Mammals, 23 — Doing 
His Work Thoroughly, 24 — Doing Justly and Loving 
Mercy, 25 — Second Eeply to Gladstone, 26 — Petti- 
fogging For or Against Genesis, 28 — Huxley's Theory 
of a Theory in Genesis, 30— Was the Hebrew Writer 
a Hebrew ? 33 — The Second Chapter of Genesis, S5 — 
"The Manufacture of Eve," 37— The Temptation in 
the Garden, 40— The Deluge, 41— The Question of the 
Deluge Locality, 42 — Feats of the Mythologizers, 46 — 
Huxley's Inexpensive Wit, 47 — Borrowed Thunder, 
48— An Old Truth Stretched Out of Shape, 49— The 
Beauty of the Xew Shape, 50 — Carlyle's Protest, 51 — 
A Variety of Assumptions, 53 — Humors of the New 
Criticism, 55 — Huxley and Bibliolatry, 60 — Bible Piety, 
Past and Present, -61— Huxley's Proclamation, 1894, 62. 



CONTENTS. 



II. 

Huxley and Christian Tradition.— The Affirmative 
Side, 72— New Confirmative Discoveries, 73 — Huxley's 
Singular Discoveries, 75 — What He Knows About the 
Spiritual World, 76 — His Analysis of the Gospels Not 
New, 77 — The Gospels Severally, 78 — His Acknowledg- 
ment, 80 — His Supernaturalism, 81 — What is the 
Supernatural? 82 — What is the Christian Religion? 
83— The Christian Religion Not Decaying, 84— The 
Religion of Naturalism, 88 — He Eulogizes the Bible, 
89 — His Two Worlds, 92 — His Rules of Nature, 
93 — His Inconsistency on this Subject, 95 — Conditions 
are Not Cause, 96 — Geology Shows Intervention, 98— 
His Examples of Natural Law, 99 — The Dilemma He 
Offers, 100— Prayer, 101— His Possible God, 103— The 
Bishop and Miracles, 104 — Scientific Men as Sharp and 
Veracious, 105 — Scientific Accuracy, 106 — Huxley's 
Veracity, 107 — Eginhard's Miracle- Working Relics, 
109 — Were the Jews Credulous? 110 — Huxley's Origi- 
nality, 112 — He Chooses the Worst Interpretations, 
114 — The Gadarene Demoniac, il5 — The Destruction of 
the Swine, 117 — Strauss and Huxley on Transfer of Ills, 
118— Belief in Evil Spirits, 121— A Possible Inductive 
Theory, 122 — Oriental Dualism, 123 — Huxley's Genera 
and Species of Christianity, 125 — Who Are Biblical 
Scholars? 127— Witness to the Miraculous, 127— No 
Witnesses to be Accepted, 129 — Huxley's Science, 130 — 
The Apocalypse, 131— The Earth's Destruction, 132— 
The Day of the Lord, 134— The Coming of Christ and 
the New Earth, 135— The Christian Era Prefigured, 
137— Huxley an Praise of Christianity, 141. 



CONTEXTS. 



False Revelations of the Unseen 145 

IV. 

Arguments for the Unseen 160 

V. 

A Universe in Little— A Dream 177 

VI. 

The Know-nothing Philosophers 191 

VII. 

Some Moral Adjustments 199 

VIII. 

The Christian's Agnosticism and Gnosis 207 



PREFACE. 



In the first two papers following, scientific 
criticism is applied to Huxley and bis scientific 
criticism, and with no more freedom of lan- 
guage than his writings abundantly exhibit. 
The aim throughout has been to express every- 
thing with exactness, using the fittest word 
whatever it be, mild or otherwise. 

The occasion was a request in February last, 
by the Philosophical Society of Great Britain, 
to criticise Huxley's proclamation in Nature^ 
JSTov. 1, 1894 ; and the paper was read and 
printed a few weeks later. This led to a care- 
ful reading of his Biblical volumes, and the 
beginning of this review some time prior to his 
death. 

The examination proves that to a consider- 
able extent he was taken too seriously by his 
admirers and probably by his opponents, whose 
replies to him have not been read by the author 
of this volume ; also that his Biblical papers 



viii 



PEEFACU. 



are in surprising contrast with the excellence 
of his biological investigations. However, he 
disclaims originality in these papers or some of 
them, though he is very original indeed in some 
of his notions, as for instance in respect to 
examples of natural law, noticed in the second 
paper of this book. 

The two volumes reviewed are confidently 
entitled " Science and Hebrew Tradition" and 
"Science and Christian Tradition," but turn 
out to be mostly literary, instead of sci- 
entific in the sense that might well carry 
with it the prestige of Huxley as a naturalist. 
But, they are doubtless as good as anything 
that can be said adversely to the Bible ; and 
the titles and authorship, especially the assump- 
tion of the august name of science, challenge a 
somewhat extended review. Humphrey Ward, 
writing in the New York Tribune, says that 
Huxley's younger scientific friends saw in him 
"the great leader, the protagonist in the 
struggle between truth and superstition." Pro- 
tagonist means leader, but more strictly the 
chief actor in a drama ; and if Huxley's 
Biblical battliugs are very like a stage affair, 
it is well to know it. 



PREFACE. 



ix 



Incidentally the writer of this (a theistic 
evolutionist) seeks to clarify some things not 
commonly well understood, or at least to put 
some questions in a more reasonable shape. It 
will be seen that he is sufficiently independent 
in his apprehension of Holy Writ, and also that 
he is well aware of the mistakes sometimes 
made in forcing the text into agreement with 
the details of science, especially by those who 
have not made science a systematic, prolonged, 
and practical study. 

The essays appended to the first two are 
independent, but in close relation with these. 
The third was published in the Bibliotheca 
Sacra; the fourth in the Forum ; the fifth in 
a provincial volume, except the appended 
reflections on Time, which in a more expanded 
form appeared in the Chicago Advance, 



Since this volume was finished and the above 
preface written, an article on Professor Huxley 
by one of his associates, Mr. Eichard H. Hut- 
ton (editor of the London Spectator), has 
appeared in the September Forum, It empha- 



PREFACE. 



sizes the Professor's inconsistencies, combative 
disposition, and humor — the last especially of 
the quality described in this volume. Speaking 
of a paper by Huxley on the question, " Has 
the frog a soul?" Mr. Hutton says: "I am sure 
that he must have written it with an ironical 
smile, foreseeing how he would puzzle most of 
his hearers with his biological statements. He 
pointed out that if the frog has a soul at all, it 
must have two souls, for if the spinal cord is 
divided, both the divided parts manifest sepa- 
rately precisely the same kind of purposive 
action, though they do not cooperate. . . . 
I do not suppose that Professor Huxle} 7 himself 
had any distinct opinion on it. . . . But the 
real object of Huxley's paper was to bewilder ; 
and, with the greater part of the Metaphysical 
Society, he certainly succeeded." This in- 
stance of Huxley's humorous style of puzzling 
is of interest as confirming the interpretation 
put on much of his writing, in the following 
pages, where his intention is not so immediately 
obvious. The real puzzle is that any members 
of the Metaphysical Society could have been 
bewildered by his ascription of purposive action 
and even "rational principles" to spinal or 



PKEFACE. 



3d 



other reflex action, after it has become such by 
habit or descent. 

In the September North American Review 
is an article on Huxley by the distinguished 
Professor William H. Flower, F. E. S. He 
puts very cleverly in the form of laudation a 
criticism that is as severe as true : " He was 
also free from a quality which paralyzes the 
effective action of many men of great mental 
capacity, the faculty of seeing something at 
least of both sides of a case at the same time." 

Though he did not originate the idea, Hux- 
ley says he made the singular discovery that 
the ecclesiastical Moses — whatever that may 
mean — was a mere traditional mask. Under 
what mask the English Moses led many into 
agnosticism, and into what Promised Land he 
conducted them, is answered in this volume. 

Note.— The ' ' mythopoeic faculty 1 1 is a phrase often used by Huxley 
and others, meaning the myth-making tendency, properly of the 
• " early human fancy," as Lang expresses it. The phrase is used by 
the destructives to sweep away much of history, down to and includ- 
ing the New Testament. But they are the modern mythopoeists. 
The word applies to those who would convert fact into myth quite as 
well as to those who may be supposed to have converted myth into 
fact. The destructives are myth-makers. This note is suggested by 
reading in Dr. Nixon's new book, " How Whitman Saved Oregon," the 
proofs that Whitman did save it — a fact that in its main particulars 
was reduced to a myth by some over-wise Oregonians only a few 
years after Dr. Whitman's death in 1847. 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL 



i. 

HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 

According to the testimony of a scientific 
and congenial acquaintance of Professor Hux- 
ley, in 1876, he was not serious in his onslaughts 
on spiritual philosophy and religious beliefs.* 
As the remark was understood, the professor 
was like many persons of his general way of 
thinking ; he cared for none of these matters, 
except as subjects for wit or argument, though 
he disowns the character of a Gallio — the dis- 
avowal very likely a part of his sword-prac- 
tice, or of the character he assumed of an 
earnest or half-earnest iconoclast. 

Having gained much eminence in scientific 
researches, and having read widely, with an 
intellectual interest in pretty much everything, 
he amused himself and exercised his rhetorical 

* The remark was made to the liberal lay president 
of a secular college, and by him repeated to the writer 
of this review. 



2 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



and polemical gifts on a variety of subjects, 
including the . Biblical, which he sought to 
make especially amusing. In so doing, and at 
the start, he found Hume most to his mind, 
and later invented the word agnostic, probably 
having noticed Sir William Hamilton's quota- 
tion of the Greek " Agnosto Theo — to the un- 
known God," and changing the axljective into 
agnostic as an antithesis in form to Gnostic, 
which he speaks of as suggesting the new 
word ; and he relates that he was a member of 
a society in which every one was an ist (pan- 
theist, theist, atheist, etc.) except himself, and 
feeling that he was the one fox without a tail, 
he looked about for an appendage and hit 
upon agnostic as one he could sport. 

Here was a new species of ism, though 
only new in name, and of course he felt bound 
to live up to it, much as the aesthete tried to 
live up to a choice piece of porcelain. He 
took up the role of a leader of doctrine, and 
continued to pose himself as such, cheered 
on by sympathizers and taking advantage of 
his high position as biologist. But he is not a 
representative of philosophical agnosticism, 
nor is he in any respect a philosopher, 
though he stumbles about in some digressions 
about natural law and cause. He acknowl- 
edges that he took his cue from Hume, Hamil- 
ton, Mansell, etc. ; but he says that he does not 



HUXLEY AND HEBKEW TRADITION". 3 

much care to speak of anything as " unknow- 
able" — in fact, he remarks, it was long ago that 
he once or twice made the mistake of so speak- 
ing, and even wasted a capital U — that is, he 
was foolish enough to talk about the Infinite. 
In 1889, he reduces all to this : " It is wrong 
for a man to say that he is certain of the ob- 
jective truth of any proposition unless he can 
produce evidence which logically justifies that 
certainty ; this is what agnosticism asserts ; 
and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to 
agnosticism." The reader, therefore, need not 
look in his books for the agnostic gospel of the 
metaphysicians, though some of the papers are 
entitled Agnosticism; and, hence, need not 
look in this review for the philosophy of 
knowledge, or of the Infinite. 

HIS HUMOR AND COMBATIVENESS. 

Such, in brief, and with more of the agnos- 
tically required evidence than appears in his 
Anthropological Study of the evolution of 
Hebrew religion, was the genesis and evolution 
of Huxley as controversialist ; and to complete 
the statement, his mingled humor and pugnaci- 
ty must be taken into account as incentives. 
Personally, he is reported as a man of genial 
kindliness. His conversational wit was noted ; 
and his magazine writings and popular lectures 



4 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



are often enlivened by wit and pervaded by 
humor. He frequently has an air of assumed 
gravity of the humorous quality. His sar- 
casms and ironies are mostly smiling rather 
than caustic and bitter — are too neatly and 
elaborately phrased to have been in savage 
earnest, or even with devotion to truth instead 
of forensic and literary effect. The agility, 
the pose, and the triumphant smile of an ac- 
robat are suggested oftener than the stress of 
real combat. In many of the essays, or in the 
special points made, there is the appearance of 
getting up a case under the guise of serious- 
ness, as in a moot court, and then resorting to 
all the ingenuities of debate on such an occa- 
sion. That he indulged in caricature is abun- 
dantly evident, and he was a man of too much 
intelligence not to know when he used that 
common weapon against the Bible and its 
doctrines, as well as when he raised false or 
irrelevant issues that bear the semblance of 
pertinence. Not infrequently his humor is 
spiced by a quasi frankness, as in his address 
on the Physical Basis of Life (protoplasm) 
where he informs his hearers that he has led 
them into a materialistic slough — which he did, 
or tried to do, by the clear necessity of knowl- 
edge, as Dr. J. H. Sterling says, w T hile he only 
showed a way out by the obscure necessity of 
ignorance, namely, as to what matter really is 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 5 

— a result that the speaker must have enjoyed 
hugely at the expense of his audience and the 
general public. 

Humor and pure sensationalism were com- 
bined in Huxley with a good deal of the gladi- 
atorial. His broad, square jaw gave a physical 
basis for this, along with his close-set lips, 
heavy nose, and beetling brows. He was a 
born fighter, but a sufficiently good-natured 
one, thanks to his vein of humor, his pleasure 
in rhetoric, and still more to his real indiffer- 
ence in regard to everything men esteem 
sacred. He was eager for a fray, especially 
when a bishop, a duke, or an eminent man like 
Gladstone, assumed to touch science and laid 
himself open to criticism, just or unjust ; on 
such occasions he felt himself to be science 
embodied, unchained, on guard, rampant, or at 
least latrant. His pugnacity, however, was 
probably discreet, for there were many Bible 
defenders, of eminence, whom he did not attack. 
Gladstone was an object of much party hatred, 
though not of Huxley's, and there must have 
been a multitude to welcome the attack, be- ' 
sides those who welcome assaults on the book 
of Genesis. 

Huxley seems to have kept clear of mar- 
tyrdom ; he had enough applauders. In- 
deed, he was far from having the intense 
earnestness and stern stuff of a reformer. He 



6 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



was not an apostle of anything, except of one 
misapplied summons — " prove it "( and be did 
not care to have it proved), and one phase of 
indifference to which he gave the name of ag- 
nosticism. All talk about his candor and love 
of truth is the worship of a clique, and is dis- 
proved by bis writings. In short, though a 
bugbear in bis day and still, he was neither a 
malignant and mighty prince of darkness, on 
the one band, nor on the other much of a 
demigod to be worshiped. 

THE AUTOMATISM LECTURE. 

To understand his methods, one needs to go 
back to his first two famous utterances, one of 
which is spoken of above. On both occasions 
it must have excited his inward laughter to be 
posed as an outspoken hero, reckless of position 
and popularity. He had a sufficient public in 
his favor, ready to accept anything, nine years 
after the Darwinian discussion began, when he 
discoursed on protoplasm, and six years later, 
in Belfast, 1874, when he proclaimed animal 
automatism, leaving that well-treated but half- 
treated subject in a very sensational shape as 
to its application to man. He was not a man 
to speak at random ; he knew the precise force 
or the ambiguity of a word ; yet in the latter 
of the two addresses referred to he confounds 



HUXLEY AND HEBKEW TEADITION. 7 

volition with emotion,* and by implication 
with will in any sense; and he denies causality 
to volition, "to make clear" which statement 
he winks out of sight the fact that his decere- 
brumized frog (or its ancestors) had acquired 
the reflex actions when not mutilated, having 
then whatever animal consciousness and mind 
a batrachian may possess. The conclusion of 
the address undoubtedly gives its animus, 
namely, to electrify the British public as Tyn- 
dall had done at the same Belfast meeting the 
Wednesday previous. The fun begins, as we 
say, when Huxley adds : " I should not wonder 
if you were told that my intention in bringing 
this subject before you is to lead you to apply 
the doctrine I have stated to man as well as 
to brutes." Apparently he disclaims such in- 
tention ; he is sarcastic toward those who 
would impute it, but in the next paragraph he 
says he does so apply it fully and entire, and 
then, without explanation, denies the logical 
fatalistic consequences and shelters himself 
behind some of his former writings, unnamed 
and unexplained, and behind certain great 
names, including John Calvin and Jonathan 
Edwards — a climax of drollery, in view of his 

* Possibly identifying both with physical feeling, 
from a protozoan upward, after the manner of the 
Bains of mental philosophy, to whom everything is 
everything and thus nothing. 



8 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



subject and argument. Although the animal 
automatism is all well enough, except as un- 
qualified in some respects, the address must be 
set down as an elaborate jest at the expense of 
good John Bull, when viewed as to its time, 
occasion and other tilts and tourneys of the 
eminent speaker. 

SENSATIONAL SCIENCE. 

The humorists, if not the sedate radicals and 
sedate conservatives, recognized the situation, 
and we cannot suppose that a man well en- 
dowed with the element of humor brought 
about the situation without a lively sense of 
this element as involved in it. The English 
periodical Ti?ne, for example, had portraits of 
Huxley and Tyndall, with halos of electric or 
phosphorescent light around their heads, ac- 
companying a long poem on " Sensational 
Science," in which are the following stanzas : 

" For science now our girls and boys 
Their love for thee recant, mime! 
The clown is shunned for higher joys, 
And Tyndall beats the pantomime. 

" Our laughing girls give up their play, 
All bitten by the mania 
To hear what Huxley has to say 
On Patagonian crania. 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 9 

" On Life and Death and Hell (0 fie!) 
These famous men enlighten us; 
They wing their flight so very high 
They positively frighten us. 

" On all our cherished creeds they fall, 
Without the least apology, 
And hurl the bowl that scatters all 
The ninepins of theology." 

While sensational enough under the circum- 
stances — departing wholly (as the New York 
Tribune correspondent wrote in reporting it) 
from the forms laid down by custom for a dis- 
course on such an occasion — TyndalPs address 
at Belfast has less of the aspect of a mischief- 
loving effort to " hurl the bowl that scatters 
all," although he, too, leaves us in a comical 
dilemma, namely, how he could reconcile his 
professed materialism with what he calls " the 
immovable basis of the religious sentiment," 
and how he could disown a materialistic 
atheism, as he does in his preface to the ad- 
dress as published, except perhaps as one who 
agnostically relegates to mystery the theolog- 
ical bearings of the subject. But, Huxley's ad- 
dress at Belfast is a serio-comic performance, 
the plot, founded on good animal psycho-phys- 
iology, taking a short and sharp turn at the 
end in a dilemma plainly intended to be utterly 
confounding — to " positively frighten us," as 



10 THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL. 

expressed in the humorous poem above quoted. 
And, what is remarkable, down to this year, 
1895, in England there are some defenders of 
spiritual philosophy and faith who seem to 
have been continuously awed by his high 
scientific standing, and perhaps social prestige 
in consequence of it — hardly by the repeated 
emissions of his theatrical thunder and lycopo- 
dium lightning. In this country, few seem to 
have been alarmed, and still fewer disturbed 
by his imitators in their occasional addresses 
before our scientific associations. Their de- 
liverances scarcely awakened an echo. In this 
large and democratic land there is and can be 
no Koyal Society nor French Institute, nor 
anything equivalent to it ; much less any presi- 
dent or prominent member of a learned body, 
who, by virtue of his position or the letters at- 
tached to his name, can straddle a continent, 
and by his bold utterances positively frighten 
us. Men are taken for what they are worth, 
or what their teaching is worth ; and we are 
not easily frightened nor too deferential. 

THE METHOD OF ZADIG. 

This brings us to the collection of Huxley's 
papers entitled Science and Hebrew Tradition, 
as illustrative not only of his fallacies but also 
of his facetiousness, and especially its presence 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 11 

under the guise of seriousness for the most part. 
The first essay, On the Method of Zadig, is in 
a style of light and airy humor in its first half. 
Throughout, it well enforces the scientific 
method, while under the words " magi " and 
" magian cosmogony " it slyly hits as quite un- 
scientific and grotesque the persons and the 
venerable record that are assumed to be at 
variance somehow with every form of evolu- 
tion, although, so late as the date of the essay, 
1880, its main point — the retrospective proph- 
ecies of the biologist in constructing lines of 
descent of animal species — could meet with no 
general and strenuous protest from any quarter, 
except in respect to the very supposititious 
nature of the pedigrees constructed, and more 
particularly the long kangaroo jumps from one 
type to another in the past succession of life. 

FIGHTING WINDMILLS. 

One thing is noticeable especially — the con- 
juring up of old objections and opinions, as if 
these were part of a warfare that science has 
now to wage ; this is one of Huxley's frequent 
pleasantries, though not peculiar to him. For 
example, in this essay and elsewhere he brings 
up the old notion of fossils as lusus naturae, 
in other papers the days of Genesis as so-called 
literal days, etc., and would in effect bring to- 



12 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



gether the opinions of several centuries as the 
one herd of sheep, or one windmill, with which 
he does Quixotic battle. There is not enough 
in the present tolerant and docile attitude of a 
large majority of educated religious men to 
make a telling dramatic situation. "New 
chapters in the warfare of science" — always ex- 
cluding the history of fierce combats of scien- 
tific men and theories with themselves — must 
be dredged up from the past. And so far as 
Biblical people accommodate their ideas and 
their interpretations of the Bible to the progress 
of science, this, too, is made a reproach — a vice 
of " reconcilers " — although accommodated in- 
terpretations of the book of Nature are never 
made a jest at the expense of progressive 
science — although, in fact, the hospitality of 
the Bible itself to advances of knowledge, so 
far, is one of the proofs of the Divine superin- 
tendence of this most wonderful of books, set- 
ting it apart in singular contrast with ancient 
writings of similar scope — yes, in contrast with 
the outgrown and fantastic science of recent 
ages. 



MISREPRESENTATION OF THE DOCTRINE OF 
CREATION. 

In the paper on Progress in Paleontology, 
we have the diverting legerdemain that com- 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 13 

pletely hides all there is in the word " creative " 
under the old idea of innumerable species 
originated wholly independently of each other, 
instead of leaving the word properly open to 
the larger sense of a directing and advancing 
by divine energy and effluence, as a part of the 
creative work, so that new elements were 
added, such as life, sensation, rationality — 
open, also, to the still larger sense that the 
entire creation was and is evolved by the 
Creative Power, of whom and by whom are all 
things, and in whom all things consist. Further 
the word " creative" is cunningly hitched to the 
word " miraculous." Much the same sleight-of- 
hand divertisement is offered to us in the Hux- 
ley-Sully article on Evolution in the Encyclope- 
dia Britannica, where the whole subject of 
creation is summarily dismissed by a similar as- 
sumption under the words " special creations," 
and by further expressed or implied assump- 
tions, namely, that evolution is a necessary 
process (that is,with nothing but Necessity as its 
God), that the natural cannot have its ground 
in the supernatural, that creation is an arbitrary 
volitional process (adroit anthropomorphic 
words), that it is but an act and only direct, and 
that secondary causes limit the sphere of 
direct divine activity, and so far eliminate 
God, the reader being left to infer that he is 
quite eliminated. Emanation, though acknowl- 



14 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



edged to be a theory of creation, is, in the 
caption of the section, made quite distinct 
from creation ; space is given to it, as later to 
the spiritual, which is presented only in a 
pantheistic form, Altogether, it is a sly 
jugglery to depreciate and dismiss the thought 
of creation and Creator by confining it to 
species or to certain fiats, assumed to date a 
few thousand years ago, and associated with 
an antiquated view of the first chapter of Gen- 
esis, which view is an essential part of the 
stock in trade of the decriers of that book. 

THE MILTON LECTURE. 

All this comes out at more length in the 
next succeeding essay, which is the Milton 
Lecture given in Xew York in 1876. The old 
hypothesis, as if it were the best orthodox 
present one, is thus stated : " that the present 
order of things, at some no very remote time, 
; had a sudden origin, and that the world, such 
• as it now is, had chaos for its phenomenal an- 
tecedent ? ' — three of the clauses a threefold mis- 
statement of the better Biblical interpretation 
in the last half -century by men of science as 
well as many theologians. The time is indef- 
initely long, except, as geology itself teaches, 
the first appearance of man was comparatively 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 15 



recent ; the origin as sudden was only such on 
the "literal day" view, long since given up, 
and in fact not entertained by some very 
ancient interpreters, patristic and Jewish ; 
and nobody ever understood that the present 
order came straight out of chaos, and (no mat- 
ter who says it is) chaos is not in the book of 
Genesis any more than it is in the first stage 
of things on the nebular theory. But no hint 
even is given that the misstatements are coun- 
tenanced b} T old misapprehensions only, a half- 
century behind the times. In the next sentence 
the grand joke of the lecture takes form — 
"That is the doctrine which you will find 
stated most fully and clearly in the immortal 
poem by John Milton ;" and the lecturer, un- 
doubtedly maintaining a sober face, extracts the 
passage from " Paradise Lost " about the first 
lion pawing to get free his hinder parts from 
the ground, and the tiger as the mole rising, 
etc. Probably there was a titter among num- 
bers of the audience. But, not satisfied with 
the doctrine as "stated," and "most fully and 
clearly" in the poetic poetry, the lecturer him- 
self states the Miltonic hypothesis in his own 
prose, which is a purposed paraphrase of the 
first chapter of the book of Genesis, carefully 
conformed to the now obsolete or very obsoles- 
cent understanding of it, thus making the 



16 



THE AGKOSTIC GOSPEL. 



Miltonic embroideries identical with a Scrip- 
ture narrative of the most prosaic and rational 
simplicity. 

Later in the lecture, with a characteristic 
assumption of frankness that is the cream of 
his drollery, he pretends to explain why he 
called it Milton's hypothesis instead of the 
Biblical doctrine. The first reason is, that the 
question about creation is a philosophical 
problem, not historical — as if the better inter- 
pretation of Genesis goes beyond presumable 
fact, and as if Evolution, the subject of the 
lecture, is not (the Huxley-Sully article in the 
Britannica shows it is) quite as philosophical 
a subject as historical. The second reason is 
manifestly ironical — that he does " not for one 
moment venture to say that it can properly be 
called the Biblical doctrine," because it is not 
"my business, and does not lie within my 
competency to say what the Hebrew text does, 
and what it does not signify," though in this 
book he repeatedly indulges in Scripture exe- 
gesis ; and, further, because he would " be met 
by the authority of many eminent scholars, to 
say nothing of men of science, who, at various 
times, have absolutely denied that any such 
doctrine is to be found in Genesis," an inci- 
dental admission that there are the weightiest 
reasons for considering fairly the newer and 
better interpretations in place of the outgrown 



HUXLEY AND HEBKEW TRADITION. 17 

ones, but an admission made only to give point 
to a sarcasm about diverse interpretations and 
"contradictions of authority upon which he is 
incompetent to form any judgment." In this 
volume elsewhere, he abundantly gives his 
judgment in these matters, whether seriously 
or not, and also in the matter of his third 
reason — the authenticity of Genesis, of which 
he here says : " I give no judgment — it would 
be an impertinence upon my part to volunteer 
even a suggestion upon such a subject." Al- 
together his reasons must have been taken by 
himself and many others as very humorous in- 
deed, especially in view of his own paraphrase 
of Genesis, which he calls the Miltonic view. 

THE CREATION OF VEGETAL LIFE. 

He goes on to test the Miltonic hypothesis, 
by which he means the Biblical record. The 
plants, appearing on the third day, must have 
been like the existing ones, such as trees and 
shrubs, he says, or else the existing ones must 
have arisen by a process of evolution. Let it 
go at that. But, an objection is elsewhere 
made by him to the place and face of the text 
about grass, seed, and fruit. He must have 
known the reasonable solution of this, namely, 
that vegetation is very naturally spoken of by 
the sacred writer once for all, the object plainly 



18 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



being to refer every kind to Divine ordering, 
with no thought of the successive appearances 
of each. This is enough to say, but our present 
knowledge can offer a further defense. Vege- 
tation is a simple melody with many variations. 
Mode of reproduction is the thing here in 
question. All modes are essentially one — the 
separation of a portion of an organism to lead 
an individual life ; and botanists tell us that 
even in the lowest plants, the protophytes, 
"sexual distinctions are possible, and may have 
hitherto been overlooked or misunderstood." 
As a fact, the divisions of plants found furthest 
back in geologic time are as truly sexual as 
the highest plants, and a name of one of these 
divisions, carposporeae, signifies the fruit-spore 
group, that is, with fructification having a 
fruit-like envelope, an odd coincidence of name 
and fact, but not given here as a scholium on 
Genesis. In botany fruit is a term applied to 
the lowest as well as the highest fructification ; 
and certainly the unbotanical writer of Genesis 
must naturally have supposed that all vegetal 
reproduction is by seed, if he gave any thought 
to the matter. Indeed, the kind of evolution 
that finds Shakespeare in the original star-dust, 
reason in Crustacea, and religion in a dog, 
should " have no great difficulty" in finding 
fruit and trees in even the Archaean graphite. 
Enough, however, that the sacred writer spoke 



HUXLEY AJfD HEBREW TRADITION. 19 

of vegetation as he saw and knew it, with not 
the slightest reference to botanical classification 
or to succession of groups, even as afterward 
he speaks of flying creatures and of monsters 
with no reference whatever to the classes and 
orders that belong to zoological classification. 

This particular subject is here mentioned at 
some length, because considerations like those 
above mentioned could not have been un- 
familiar to Huxley. It was part of his game 
to ignore them. As to vegetation appearing 
on the third day, a whole aeon before animals, 
nobody ever can deny it, the rocks before the 
Proterozoic covering an immensity of time and 
being so metamorphosed that the vestiges of 
life are obliterated, with a single questioned 
exception so far. In general, while vegetable 
and animal have much in common and are 
near each other in their lowest forms, it is an 
obvious fact that animal life as a whole depends 
on the vegetal, and that the latter as a whole 
is of lower grade, so that it might well have 
preceded the former, even for a long period. 

THE CREATION OF ANIMAL LIFE. 

Still keeping up his Milton masquerade, 
the lecturer, or rather prestidigitator, amuses 
himself and mystifies his audience by pulling 
" birds " out of his hat. If he took any care to 



20 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



look up the subject he mast have known that 
the Hebrew word, too narrowly translated 
fowl, simply means flier, and that it would 
apply as well to his carboniferous insects as 
anything else, if there were occasion to bring 
them at all into the argument, as he does labo- 
riously in order to show that there were ter- 
restrial animals before " birds " (fliers), and 
thus have it appear that these and aquatic 
animals, with nothing else, make the fifth 
period of Genesis a blunder. Of course, true 
birds can be admitted here under the word 
flier, for Genesis is here giving animal life 
down to an age of mammals, and geology 
finds birds before its Age of Mammals. He 
goes on to fish great whales out of his hat, 
taking advantage of the old translation of a 
word that simply means monster, and that 
now, in the light of geolog\^, would well apply 
to the great Mesozoic amphibia and reptiles 
which were contemporary with reptilian birds 
and true birds. It was Huxley himself who 
coined the word Sauropsida to name his group- 
ing together of reptiles and birds — a grouping 
that has a singular coincidence with the mon- 
sters and fliers of Genesis 1 : 21. 

He would have us shocked to think that 
" the whole series of fossiliferous stratified 
rocks must be referred to the last two days " 
of the narrative. But he well knew that, 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 21 

although Genesis may now be interpreted in 
the light of geology, the jejune attempt to 
identify the six or more ages of geology with 
the periods of Genesis had long since been 
given up. The entire muddle he would make 
of it is clarified at once by making the fifth 
day, with no special reference to a geological 
table of strata, extend to such time as mam- 
mals become a conspicuous feature of terres- 
trial life, no matter where the first small an- 
cestor of mammals appeared in the Mesozoic. 
His little dilemma here again, as in the case of 
plants, that present species must have been 
created at first or else new ones afterward 
evolved, is not at all in the text, which has 
nothing to say on the subject. ISTor does the 
text imply, as he would have it, that there 
were ¥ breaks in the uniformity of nature's 
operations" — something "other than a clear 
and orderly sequence." His serio-comic trav- 
esty ending here, he proceeds in the next two 
lectures to give a good statement of the 
palaeontological claims of evolution. 

GLADSTONE AND GENESIS. 

The next paper, dated 1885, is the first one 
in which he goes for Gladstone. It was rare 
sport to sight this leviathan of the deep, spout 
ing about science and Scripture ; and Huxley 



22 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



felt that Job's challenge was urgent : " Canst 
thou draw out leviathan with a hook ? Canst 
thou fill his skin with barbed irons ?" Of 
course, in view of what has been said in the 
last paragraphs, Gladstone's language was not 
felicitous in summing up the fifth day's ap- 
pearances as the " water-population " and 
" air-population," and the sixth's as the " land- 
population of animals " and man. Huxley gets 
in his little harpoons by thrusting in his 
palaeozoic insects as air- and land-population 
between two water-populations, namely, the 
aquatic invertebrates and the vertebrate fish, 
his air-population being an insect's wing from 
the Middle Silurian and scorpions from the 
Upper Silurian, both of which facts, important 
enough in geology, are set forth as if having 
much to do with Gladstone and Genesis, where- 
as it is not a questiou of inconspicuous first 
appearances. Then, as to the later life, Huxley 
makes palaeozoic Amphibia and the possible 
Eeptilia of that time, the land-population com- 
ing next, though why more terrestrial than 
aquatic does not appear ; and on the top of all, 
mesozoic birds and pterodactyls and Tertiary 
bats. This order of " first appearances " is true 
enough, and it is well put if the object is to set 
an insect buzzing about and stinging Glad- 
stone's form of statement, and in general to 
rattle the words water-population, air-popula- 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 23 

tion, land-population, vertebrate, invertebrate, 
through eight or ten pages, as if there were, in 
the argument as stated, a relevancy to the 
original Hebrew record. 

THE CREATION OF MAMMALS. 

What is especially noteworthy is the hocus- 
pocus by which Huxley again gets marine 
mammals — whales and porpoises — into the 
Hebrew for monsters, sufficiently referable here 
to other things, whether discriminated or not 
by the author of Genesis ; also, now includes 
even bats in the flying things of that early 
period ; and, further, makes the creeping things 
of verses 25 and 26 comprehend all kinds 
of terrestrial animals except " cattle " and 
"beasts," whereas, according to a good Hebraist, 
the word reh-mes is " derived from a verb sig- 
nifying to move or tread, and by no means 
limited in its application to insects and rep- 
tiles," the verb form being variously used in 
the Scriptures, for example, in the sense of 
stealthy movement, as in Ps. 104, " the beasts 
of the forest do creep forth," so that, the noun 
being used here in Genesis as supplementary to 
cattle and beasts, it may suitably refer to the 
many and various wild mammals other than 
the larger wild beasts proper, particularly the 
small and unobtrusive that are timid or stealthy 



24 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



by reason of defenselessness. In succeeding 
pages of the essay now under comment the 
author maintains that flying things must have 
been preceded by wingless, and that man may 
have preceded the horse, both, which proposi- 
tions may be granted. 

DOING HIS WORK THOROUGHLY. 

Then the author proceeds " to do one's work 
thoroughly while one is about it;" he essays 
to rout all defenders of Genesis, not Gladstone 
alone, by a grand final charge — that the con- 
ception underlying the whole of Genesis is 
that animal species, instead of continuously 
originating and dying out, originated during 
and only during three distinct and successive 
periods of time. Not a bit of it. His state- 
ment has no force on the long-period interpre- 
tation. And he knew well enough that Gen- 
esis has nothing to say that touches the 
subject of successive or contemporaneous spe- 
cies one way or the other — much less that 
on the period interpretation it implies that 
all of a kind appeared together at three or 
any number of junctures. It only gives, 
in its own general terms, the general in- 
troduction and prevalence conspicuously of 
swarming sea creatures, flying things, mon- 
sters, and afterwards cattle and beasts, as 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 25 

characterizing two periods, precisely as geol- 
ogy in its own way characterizes the palaeo- 
zoic as the age of invertebrates, the Devo- 
nian as the age of fishes, and the Cenozoic 
as the age of mammals, omitting, as geology 
does, from this characterization the first more 
or less obscure appearances. If he means also 
that the orthodox view would include present 
species as originating in three great periods, or 
any -lumber, many aeons ago, it might just as 
well be claimed, or urged as an objection, that 
" every living thing that moveth " and " every 
living creature after its kind " means individ- 
uals that are now actually living on the earth. 

DOING JUSTLY AND LOVING MERCY. 

The essay closes piously, with high commen- 
dations of Micah's conception of religion — 
" What doth the Lord require of thee, but to 
do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk 
humbly with thy God" — a refreshing quota- 
tion under the circumstances, made by an 
agnostic, acknowledging that there is a God, 
and suggesting that one should treat " justly " 
a record that may have difficulties or ancient 
forms of expression, but certainly is regarded 
by many of the wisest men, dead or living, as 
Divine in its singular consistency with all truth, 
old or new, and as such should be " humbly " 



2Q 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



and continuously studied or held in reverent 
suspense, not peremptorily and contemptu- 
ously dismissed. Somehow, even they who 
discard it can never let it alone. 

i 

SECOND REPLY TO GLADSTONE. 

Accordingly, in 1886, in reply to Gladstone's 
reply, Huxley returns to the subject. His har- 
poons having failed to dispatch the grand old 
man (as Gladstone is termed in this country), 
the sport will surely be renewed with improved 
bomb-lances. But here again we have birds 
picked out of the hat of an indefinite Hebrew 
word mistranslated fowl ; and monster is again 
made in the text to necessarily include marine 
mammals; and there is a triumphant reference 
to Leviticus 11 : 29-31 to prove that " creep- 
ing things'' must include terrestrial reptiles, 
though in his note at the end of the essay 
Huxley acknowledges that the Hebrew word 
sheh-retz, not reh-mes, is used in the passage in 
Leviticus, and that it has a wider sense that 
may include reptiles of the water, the earth, or 
the land ; and he ignores the fact that it is the 
very word sheli-retz that occurs in Genesis 
1 : 20-21, where it refers to aquatic creatures, 
so that, interpreted by close context, the reh- 
mes of Genesis 1 : 24-26 is not the sheh-retz of 
Leviticus — a difficulty that he seeks to avoid 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 27 

by saying it is not a question of words but of 
things ! — not a question of Hebrew text ! 
This lance wholly misses its mark ; and its 
fa^ure is confirmed by the verb forms that ex- 
plain the nouns ; these forms would make 
sheh-retz signify prolific creatures, and reh-rnes 
suitably apply to those that have been pointed 
out in a previous paragraph of this review. In 
the same victorious style, Huxley refers to 
Leviticus 11 : 13-19, to show that the flying 
things (mistranslated fowl) of the fifth day 
must include bats, which are mammals. But 
the flying things of Genesis 1 were before the 
scriptural and geological age of mammals, 
while in Leviticus we have flying things of 
kinds now extant, and the argument falls to 
the ground. It looks very much like a bit of 
dishonest tactics in controversy. 

In the rest of this second reply to Gladstone 
there is nothing of any importance bearing on 
the real merits of any question between reve- 
lation and science. It is in the usual style of 
Huxley's controversial and other magazine 
writings — a sportive or half-sportive attitudin- 
izing and fencing, and a smilingly self-compla- 
cent glassing himself in his own rhetoric and 
especially in his irony, with much studied cir- 
cumlocution and more or less profound bowing 
in seemingly mock deference to the man or 
thing he is criticising, all which must have 



28 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL* 



afforded himself no little recreation, if not 
positive amusement ; and it was kept up to the 
end of life, characterizing his final effort in the 
Nineteenth Century, March, 1895, the whole 
gist of the article being an attempt to discrim- 
inate agnosticism from positivism and natural- 
ism, which might have been done in six lines had 
not Arthur Balfour's book (" The Foundations 
of Belief") offered a distinguished occasion 
for Huxley to exhibit himself at large, as in 
the case of his tilts at the three bishops in 

1886, Gladstone and the Duke of Argyll in 

1887, the Principal of King's College in 1889 
etc. 

PETTIFOGGING FOR OR AGAINST GENESIS. 

In respect to Gladstone's second and modi- 
fied presentation of Genesis, it is certainly 
open to criticism, and this only concerns him- 
self and his critic. However it may be in this 
case, it is to be regretted that in many instances 
a scientific defense of Genesis is not left to 
those who have made a fairly thorough and 
practical study of the sciences involved, instead 
of those persons who have merely read up 
science to some extent for the occasion. Here, 
for example, is a recent book by a brilliant, 
probably young, American clergyman, whose 
zeal for the Bible leads him into extravagances ; 



HUXLEY AiTD HEBREW TRADITIOK. 29 



thus, finding in the original Hebrew word signi- 
fying expanse, and mistranslated " firmament," 
one of the several meanings or a root-meaning 
to be the spreading out or beating as a metal 
by hammering, he discovers in the word all 
the hammering thunder of the stormy times 
when the present oceans were evaporated as 
fast as the suspended water fell on the hissing, 
half-cooled globe, to fail again ceaselessly in 
hot rain, with continuous lightning ; and he 
takes Huxley's table of geological formations 
and first appearances of life (in the first reply 
to Gladstone) and alongside of it he tabulates 
the clauses of Gen. 1 : 20-21, showing a coinci- 
dence all the way from Cambrian to Eocene — 
as if the author of Genesis or as if Divine 
inspiration can be supposed to have arranged 
the order of the clauses in those two verses so 
as to agree with the order of pretty much all 
the ages and periods of the geologic series, or 
indeed any of them. There is no assurance of 
a comprehensive taking in of the facts and 
bearings of a science without a systematic con- 
tinued study of it. But the misuse of scrappy 
science is not confined to any class of persons 
or subjects ; it appears everywhere. It abounds, 
for example, in the books of an able writer and 
lawyer, Ignatius Donnelly. In his " Kagnarok," 
to take one instance, he finds confirmation of 
his cometary origin of the geologic drift in a 



so 



THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL. 



quotation from Geike, describing the confused 
and burnt appearance of certain drift in Scot- 
land (simply colored by anhydrous iron sesqui- 
oxide, like red soils elsewhere), and he over- 
looks or suppresses the fact that Geike traces 
this to certain rock strata, thus excluding the 
wild idea that it is the debris of a comet. This 
is pettifogging, and there is too much of it for 
and against the Scriptures — by even men of 
science sometimes. Indeed, Huxley's Bible 
discussions are pettifogging all through. 

HUXLEY'S THEORY OF A THEORY IN GENESIS. 

The long appendix to "Mr. Gladstone and 
Genesis," on " the proper sense of the Mosaic 
narrative," would seem on the face of it to be 
a sincere statement of Huxley's understanding 
of the narrative, or rather of the conceptions 
of the author of Genesis, underlying the record, 
for that is what the note amounts to. As an 
idle divining of preconceptions, made to con- 
form to the most infantile ancient ideas and 
superstitions in regard to nature, the note is of 
little importance, even if it be quite serious, of 
which we can never be sure. It is at most 
simply Huxley's theory that the author had a 
theory f and his theory of the theory. He 
thinks that the word " day " is used in the 
" popular sense," that is, twenty-four hours. 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 31 

Why it should be regarded as the one and only 
popular sense, or natural sense, or the sense re- 
quired by the author's theory, if he had one, 
does not appear. Every one knows that day is 
used in various senses here in Genesis ; it is 
applied first to light itself (" God called the 
light day ") before the diurnal periods tkat 
began when the sun appeared ; and in chapter 
second the whole six days are called a day ; 
and throughout the Bible and in our common 
speech it is familiarly, popularly, naturally 
used for any period of any length. 

It is no new dodge to get around a modern 
difficulty, for, as already remarked, it was in- 
terpreted as a long period or somehow figura- 
tive by many in ancient times, among them 
Josephus, Philo, Origen, and St. Augustine. 
The only apparent difficulty is the words" the 
evening aud the morning were the first day," 
and so on. Literally, this gives no sense except 
to make night the day. We are at liberty, 
j therefore, to make it mean the conjoined ending 
'. and beginning of periods, the dividing of one 
period from another. But we need not leave 
it thus, if the original Hebrew be taken into 
account, as it should be above all ; without 
this, discussion is futile. And, going no further 
back for authority, it happens well that we 
have that of an excellent Hebraist, George 
Bush, at the very time — about fifty-six years 



32 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



ago — when John Pye Smith was the great 
" reconciler " in his notion that all geological 
ages could find abundant room in the first 
verse of Genesis, " in the beginning," and thus 
the days could be common days, a provisional 
opinion held before and immediately after him 
by many men of science and many exegetes ; 
in fact, it was the favorite one just then. Thus, 
there was at that time no pressure to force 
exegesis in favor of long periods, and the com- 
ments of Bush may be regarded as free and 
unbiased, founded on the best scholarship of 
himself and others. In his " Notes on Genesis " 
he says that nothing is more common in 
Hebrew than to find the singular used in a col- 
lective sense equivalent to the plural ; and thus 
the " evening and the morning " can be under- 
stood as a series. Further, he shows that in 
the expression the " first day," the word trans- 
lated " first " means one, and the same Hebrew 
word (ahad) is repeatedly used in the sense of 
peculiar, certain, special, unique, different from 
other; and the second day, third, etc., are to 
be interpreted by the first or one day, the 
word for day (yom) being in various passages 
of the Bible employed indefinitely for period. 
And the use of the word days in the fourth 
commandment does not necessarily disturb this 
rendering. All this is fighting over an old 
battle, but one that is still new to many, and 



HUXLEY AKD HEBREW TRADITION. 33 



is kept up by the jesters at Genesis, particularly 
by Huxley. 

WAS THE HEBREW WRITER A HEBREW? 

The note goes on to say that we must put 
ourselves into the position of a Phoenician or 
Chaldean philosopher to grasp the meaning of 
the Hebrew writer — an amusing begging of the 
question, which is exactly whether that writer, 
very possibly using traditions and older docu- 
ments * that might have come down from the 
first revelations to man, with or without accre- 

* The negative critics, who would pitchfork the most 
of the Pentateuch at one throw to a date ten or twelve 
centuries later, of course talk of much of it as later 
than the Babylonian exile, and would like to get its 
cosmogony from the Babylonian. But the oldest record 
found in cuneiform tablets, the Akkadian, recently dis- 
covered, amounts to nothing as a source of Genesis 1 or 
2. See translation by Theo. G. Pinches in the Academy 
(Londou), Nov. 29, 1890. The previously known Baby- 
lonian account of the creation, found and published by 
George Smith, has hardly more than a single point of 
resemblance. The Babylonian cosmogony as given by 
Berosus has some striking points of agreement, but in 
many respects extreme disagreement. The Bible cos- 
mogony is either the earliest and pure revelation to man 
or the common tradition reconstructed and purified and 
sublimed by Divine inspiration. But, they are still 
Babylonianizing it, as witness a recent book by a Berlin 
professor, 



34 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



tions and contortions of superstition— whether 
that Hebrew writer was so influenced and en- 
lightened by the Spirit of God as to construct 
the narrative in a wa} r that of course did not 
give him " our present knowledge of nature," 
but none the less resulted in a record, on the 
most risky of subjects, long prior to that 
knowledge and yet wonderfully consistent 
with its immense advances, when the record is 
examined by eminent Christian men of science 
as well as by theologians — a fact without 
parallel in any cosmogony or any ancient con- 
ception of the universe, and a record without 
parallel in its rational and sublime simplicity, 
acknowledged by all men. Thus, in view of 
his begging of the entire question, no further 
space need be given to Huxley's theory of the 
Hebrew writer's theory, involving the Common 
Version mistranslation of expanse by the word 
firmament, and a supposition that light and 
darkness were conceived as entities, that water 
and earth were regarded as generative, that 
man corporeal is represented as made in the ; 
corporeal likeness of God, whereas the likeness 
there mentioned is in connection with dominion 
over nature, and so refers to man's highest en- 
dowments. 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 



35 



THE SECOND CHAPTER OF GENESIS. 

The note closes with a paragraph about the 
second chapter of Genesis, regarded as contain- 
ing a different account of creation, inconsistent 
with the first. This is not Huxley's discovery. 
It is a nice little tradition of modern Biblicists. 
But the account can be construed as a brief 
recapitulation, and becomes clear if the word 
rendered " before " in the second verse be 
translated "not yet," as it may be, and " but" 
in the sixth verse be rendered " nor," as the 
Hebrew particle is often properly construed in 
the Scriptures when it follows a negative. 
The sense would then be : in the day that the 
Lord God made the earth and the heavens ; 
not yet — down to that time or stage of crea- 
tion — was there plant, nor rain, nor even mist. 
Thus, with this reference of the beginning to 
God, concordant with the first chapter, the 
writer, without further recapitulation, refers to 
Him the consummation in man's creation ; it 
was God from first to last, now called the 
Lord God (Jehovah Elohim) to include the 
special name Jehovah as that of Him who pre- 
sided over the ensuing history of man.* 

* Judged by its derivation, "the name Jehovah sig- 
nifies that the being of God has a progressive manifes- 
tation and development. It points to God's relations to 
man in history." "In Psalm xix. God is called el 



36 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



Here, He is said to have formed man of the dust 
of the ground, the mention of man's material 
nature being a fit preface to his material abode 
and work in the garden, and to his later life of 
labor until his return to the dust (" for dust thou 
art"), in contrast with the first chapter, which 
speaks of man's diviner nature, his likeness to 
God, in connection with his lordship over the 
world. In the nineteenth verse there is no neces- 
sary implication that beasts were made after 
man ; the writer or compiler of the record cer- 
tainly could not have been so utterly blind to 
the first chapter ; it amounts to this, that in the 

when his revelation in nature is referred to, but Jehovah 
when the reference is to his revelation in the Law." 
Schaff -Herzog, Encyc. of Eel. Knowl. ' 1 Both names, 
he [Havernick] admirably proves, are used by Moses 
discriminately, in strict conformity with the theological 
idea he wished to express in the immediate context; 
and, pursuing the Pentateuch nearly line by line, it is 
astonishing to see that Moses never uses any of the 
names at mere random or arbitrarily. Elohim is the 
abstract expression for absolute Deity. . . . Elohim 
is the Creator, Jehovah the Redeemer." Kitto, Cyc. of 
Bib. Lit., 1st ed. But we have grown so wise that we 
find the Pentateuch made up of many original docu- 
ments, of which we know nothing, and particularly that 
it is not Mosaic, but a mosaic of bits of fragments from 
a Jehovistic and an Elohistic writer, cleverly put to- 
gether, to the number of thirty or forty in a chapter, 
according to the fragmentary hypothesis that reduced 
itself to absurdity. 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION". 37 

naming of creatures by Adam, the pervading 
truth that everything was formed by God 
comes in as a recapitulation without reference 
to order of time. This view of the second 
chapter may or may not agree closely with 
that of commentators; it is presented as an 
obvious one, after a fair understanding of the 
two Hebrew particles that in our English ver- 
sion make a puzzle of the fifth and sixth verses. 
Something like it ought to be obvious to any 
objector who is not simply amusing himself 
and the public, or who is not a purblind anat- 
omist of text as dead letter instead of living 
truth. 

"THE MANUFACTURE OF EVE." 

Next follows what Huxle} 7 terms jocosely 
the manufacture of Eve. This, as the text 
stands, is the first real stumbling-block in the 
book of Genesis. It is certainly out of har- 
mony with all we know of the Divine methods, 
if taken otherwise than as a vision given to 
Adam, and explained by himself as teaching 
the oneness of husband and wife. Revelation 
was at first and often by visions or dreams. 
The learned and cautious commentator, Bush, 
here selected because he was a Princeton 
Presbyterian, and at the time a professor in a 
very orthodox university, wrote in 1838 ; 



33 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



" As this deep sleep is said to have been caused 
in a supernatural way, the Septuagint version 
is probably correct in rendering it ecstacy or 
trance, such as usually fell upon prophets and 
others when favored with visions and revela- 
tions from God. Xor do we see any objection 
to Lightfoot's supposition, that such was the 
nature of Adam's sleep at this time, chat the 
whole scene of Eve's creation was presented to 
his imagination as a divinely inspired dream." 
The place in Dr. John Lightfoot's works is not 
cited, but in notes on this part of Genesis he 
evidently regards the dream as corresponding 
to an outward transaction. But, one may well 
ask, who reported the matter except Adam, 
and how otherwise than as something visioned 
in trance or sleep ; and by him as childlike, in 
the childhood of the world, possibly not dis- 
tinguished from objective reality, and as such 
coming down in tradition ? 

Such an explanation (independently sug- 
gested by the writer of this review in a volume, 
" The Spirit of Beauty," 1SS8, and not censured, 
so far as the author is aware) is favored by the 
creation of adam, the generic man, " male and 
female " in the first chapter, the word adam 
being also used collectively in later chapters, as 
in Gen. 5 : 2 u he called their name adam," and 
in Gen. 9 : 6, " whoso sheddeth man's [adam's] 
blood," etc. It is countenanced, too, by the 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 39 

implied existence of other families of the human 
race, of course male and female, in the fourth 
chapter, in the time of the individual Adam 
and his youthful sons, he having been chosen 
from the race as a representative for special 
purposes, as many reasonably infer. The only 
difficulty, on the above view, is in the words 
preceding the trance — " there was not found a 
help meet for him ;" and the difficulty can 
stand unexplained, if any one chooses to have 
it so, like many other difficulties in records, 
human or divine, although in this case the 
words might be quickly reconciled by simply 
emphasizing two of them : " there was not 
found a help meet for him," that is, no one in 
the existing race was yet found or selected as 
a fit companion for one chosen to be the head 
of a new dispensation, until Eve was found. 

In all this the supernatural is not at issue, 
for that is in revelation by trance. The super- 
natural, moreover, is all-embracing, including 
God, and man so far as he is supe?>, above, 
natura, nature, in his spiritual, free, Godlike en- 
dowments, and it takes in redemption, regenera- 
tion, immortality. A believer in the Bible, 
and even an interpreter of Nature in the light 
of Divine Eeason, must stand firmly, squarely, 
on the supernatural, and of course on the 
miraculous as one of its many possible mani- 
festations, but without interjecting this where 



40 



THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL. 



one can interpret more in accordance with 
Divine methods and with related passages of 
Scripture, as in the foregoing paragraph. 

TEE TEMPTATION IN THE GARDEN. 

The third chapter, to which Huxley refers as 
the "snake talking," is too large a subject to 
be dismissed in a jest ; many men of learning 
and ability in all ages have found it worthy of 
serious study, and it is too large to be consid- 
ered here. Enough that it has been considered 
strictly historical by many, Satan assuming the 
form of a serpent and speaking, and so on ; by 
others, including ancient Jews and Christian 
fathers, it is held to be allegorical, or at least 
to some extent figurative, and they find this 
view favored by what seems to be the S3 T mbol- 
ism of a tree of the knowledge of good and evil 
and a tree of eternal life. As to the main point, 
a test of obedience given and that of a simple 
sort, there is nothing in this that is incredible 
as occurring in the childhood of the human 
race. Incidentally and in general it may be 
remarked here that the l^ew Testament, while 
it adopts the Old Testament, does not include 
in its purpose and scope an inquiry into the 
literal truth of all particulars in the Old Testa- 
ment records as to persons, events, and scenes ; 
it uses these as they stand recorded and as 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 41 



illustrative, even adding new touches and tints 
in order to enforce Christian truth, just as it 
quotes Old Testament language freely, often 
not verbatim. 

THE DELUGE. 

The sixth and seventh papers in this volume 
of Huxley's writings are " The Lights of the 
Church and the Light of Science" and "Hasisa- 
clra's Adventure," both dealing with the Deluge. 
He grants that there is nothing in a great de- 
struction by flood and the saving of a few in 
an ark that is incredible, and he shows clearly 
that the universality of the Deluge has been 
given up by " The Lights of the Church." 
Yery naturally giving preference to the pagan 
version of the event found in the Nineveh tab- 
lets, he pronounces all versions mythical. But 
the almost universal prevalence of the tradition 
in one form or another should make it highly 
probable that a great catastrophe did happen 
to the human race in its ancient seat some- 
where. He makes a long and elaborate argu- 
ment to prove that the Deluge, assumed to 
have been in the valley of Mesopotamia, could 
not have occurred to the height described, nor 
anyhow without sweeping away an ark to 
destruction southward in the Persian Gulf — 
his reasons being the great height of the 



42 THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 

mountains and plateaus adjacent and the slope 
of the valley to the sea, all which is good 
reasoning against that locality, not against the 
event itself. 

THE QUESTION OF THE DELUGE LOCALITY. 

It is much to be regretted that the Flood has 
been commonly spoken of as in or including 
that locality, probably because the " mountains 
of Ararat" of Scripture are assumed to be the 
same as the twin peak Ararat north of Mesopo- 
tamia, whereas the phrase applies to any part 
of the plateau region of Armenia, and may 
have been used for another region, as in the 
case of many repeated geographical names, 
especially those that signify some feature 
found in more places than one. Irrespective 
of name, the Armenian locality is neutralized 
by another tradition that the resting-place of 
the ark and the cradle of mankind was a 
mountain on the slope of which was built the 
ancient city Ecbatana (the southern of the two 
Ecbatanas), now Hamadan. This is approxi- 
mately east of Babylonia and directly east of 
Southern Mesopotamia, as the narrative in 
Gen. 11 : 2 would require. The chief pass be- 
tween the ancient Media Magna and Mesopo- 
tamia is near this mountain ; and, following an 
eastern branch of the Tigris, the descendants 



fiUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 43 

of Noah would have reached Mesopotamia. 
Moreover, from the mountain eastward is a 
great valley ending in the vast salt-marsh 
south of the Caspian Sea, the Great Salt 
Desert, which Sir Oliver St. John reported as 
below or not much above the level of the sea; 
and a geologist reports " recent or sub-recent " 
unconsolidated deposits as covering plains and 
even the hills to a considerable height in 
Persia, speaking of this as the most striking 
feature of the country. In all this, the condi- 
tions and general tradition and Scripture favor 
some part of the old Iran, now Persia, as the 
original seat of mankind, and hence the scene 
of the Deluge. Further, the earthquakes and 
volcanoes of the region favor a possible great 
ancient convulsion. 

Granting that the garden planted in Eden 
was in Armenia (see Dr. S. C. Bartlett's addition 
to article " Eden " in the American edition of 
" Smith's Bible Dictionary"), the post-Eden 
home of the Adamic race may have been any- 
where in the Persian or Caspian region, or other 
Asian, but with least probability in Armenia, 
taking into view the doubtless extensive coun- 
try, called garden, from which Adam was driven 
out. There is no excuse for adopting the 
Mesopotamian valley for the Noachian Flood, 
with the Scriptures before our eyes. Huxley's 
labored argument becomes a huge purposed 



THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL. 



jest if we suppose that he was not necessarily 
misled by commentators, and took the trouble 
to inquire whither the immediate descendants 
of Noah traveled after the Deluge. In Gen. 
11 : 2, following a list of the NoachidaB in 
chapter ten, it is written : " And it came to 
pass, as they journeyed from the east,* that 
they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and 
they dwelt there." Shinar was Babylonia, the 
southern part of the Mesopotamian valley, the 
part south of Mesopotamia in its restricted 
sense. Hence, the Noachian Deluge did not 
occur there, and Huxley's elaborate argument 
slips away down the slope like the suppositi- 
tious flood in that region. The tribes of Noah, 
journeying from the east, found the plain of 
Babylonia, implying that they came over or 
through highlands, apparently from a region 
south or east of the Caspian Sea, in or near 

*A Bible lexicographer says: "The Hebrew is more 
correctly translated in the margin, also in Gen. xiii. 11, 
eastward, the writer, as it would seem, describing the 
position of Mesopotamia in reference to his own country 
rather than to Ararat. 1 ' But, in Gen. xiii., Lot did 
journey eastward, whereas if the descendants of Noah 
had so journeyed it must have been from western Syria 
eastward. The clause "describing the position of Meso- 
potamia in reference to his own country" is nonsense 
here, because it gives no direction of the journeyings, 
whereas the sacred writer evidently sought to state the 
direction pursued after the Deluge. 



HUXLEY AND HEBKEW TEADITION. 45 

the supposed first center of distribution of the 
race. They did not journey south or southeast 
from Armenia. 

The Caspian lowlands are in the line of the 
extensive old sea that separated Europe from 
Asia, where, in a pluvial season, a renewed 
submergence, or an incursion of ocean, may 
have occurred. According to Prof. Marcus E. 
Jones, of Salt Lake City, rainfall alone, if but 
double its present amount, would raise Great 
Salt Lake in Utah (like the Caspian having no 
outlet) to nine hundred feet above its present 
level ; and such great oscillations, he says, 
have repeatedly taken place in the Quaternary 
period, the rise covering a great extent of 
country. Eeclus states that, if the concavity 
of the basin of the Caspian were filled, this sea 
would submerge several hundred thousand 
square miles of the Kussian steppes. Indeed, 
Huxley, in the Nineteenth Century, 1890, writ- 
ing on the Aryan question, supposes that when 
the Aryan race came into existence, there was 
what he calls the Pontic Mediterranean — a 
vast inland sea, including the Aral, Caspian, 
and Euxine (Black Sea), covering the plains of 
the Danube and the Yolga, and discharging 
itself into the Arctic Ocean by the valley of 
the Obi. In the article by Krapotkin on the 
Transcaspian Region, in the Encyclopedia 
Britannica, evidence is given of the great 



46 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL 



Post-Glacial changes in that region, especially 
elevation and desiccation, affecting seas, lakes, 
and rivers even in historic times. In short, 
since the human race began, there have been 
or might have been vast disturbances, and pos- 
sibly by rapid as well as by slow causes, in the 
general region where the human family began 
to multiply, and while the race was within 
comparatively narrow limits. Nothing is more 
reasonable, and world-wide traditions affirm it. 

FEATS OF THE MYTHOLOGIZERS. 

The explaining away of these traditions, as 
pretty much everything else, by vagarists in 
comparative mythology, is as fanciful as the 
so-called myths they would explain, reducing, 
for example, the Polynesian forms of the tra- 
dition to the daily phenomenon of the sea at 
sunset ingulfing the sun, or at moonset the 
moon. This is a mythologizer's guess, but it 
would be no argument against the wide tradi- 
tionality of the Deluge if it had actually 
degenerated into a thousand fantastic forms or 
had been applied to various phenomena; it is 
still the world-wide tradition of a deluge, and 
very likely preserved through centuries by its 
local variations and applications, or even by 
taking on grotesque mythological phases, 
whereas in a simple traditional shape it might 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 



4? 



long since have faded out. The mythologizers 
would have it that in the human mind some 
sublimated ideas of nature, especially of sun 
and sky, or cloud, became precipitated in 
deluge legends everywhere ; but it is more 
likely that an actual deluge was vaporized into 
cloudj r myths. The question remains, why is 
there a deluge at all in the prevalent myths, 
and one that seems very widely to preserve 
some likeness to the Noachian in incidental 
features ? 

HUXLEY'S INEXPENSIVE WIT. 

Certain examples of Huxley's wit rather 
than humor occur here and there in this vol- 
ume, of a kind on a level with the the big- 
worded cheap style of newspaper-item wit, 
particularly the wise language often at- 
tributed jocosely to Boston boys and girls. 
Such is his reference to Lot's wife as chemic- 
ally changed into chloride of sodium, and 
Jonah making an experiment in submarine 
navigation, etc. According to his methods 
generally, it is a wonder that Huxley did not 
make the Jonah sea-monster a whale and dis- 
course of its small throat or the small food of 
whales, especially as the Revised Version (by 
courtesy so called) retains the word whale* in 

* The Greek Jcetos could just as well have been trans- 
lated sea-monster, as the revisers must have known. 



48 



THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL. 



Matt, 12 : 40, just as in the next chapter, Matt. 
13 : 38-39, it retains " world " for two very dif. 
ferent tbings in the Greek, kosmos and aion 
(aeon), occurring, too, in the same sentence. 
And it is a wonder that he does not bring in 
some allusion to Joshua as signaling down- 
brakes and pulling the reverse lever of the 
earth's motion, as if the Scriptures had some- 
thing to say there about the earth's revolution. 

BORROWED THUNDER. 

The last essay in this volume is entitled 
"The Evolution of Theology: an Anthropo- 
logical Study." It is no doubt serious, so far as 
a dipping into the Old Testament can be 
serious by one who, in the preface of his book, 
would class it and the New Testament with 
the Koran. The laugh here is not so much by 
a,s on Huxley, for the essay turns out mainly 
to be a rehash of the radical or negative criti- 
cism of the Old Testament which has been 
going on for a century and especially for the 
last sixty years, The very first sentences of 
Chancellor Schmauk's excellent summary and 
summary refutation of that criticism* are 
these : " The negative criticism claims that 
the religion of the Old Testament is an evolu- 

* The Negative Criticism and the Old Testament. By 
Theodore E. Schmauk. New York: John B. Alden. 1895. 



HUXLEY AXD HEBREW TRADITION. 49 

tion, not a revelation. Like all other religions, 
it was at first polytheistic and idolatrous. 
Beginning as an altogether natural product of 
the Hebrew mind, it developed by slow and 
gradual stages, passing into the pure monothe- 
ism of the prophets, and culminating in the 
complex ceremonial of the priestly law ;" and 
this hypothesis in very much of its further 
detail is repeated by Huxley, with added scraps 
about the idolatries of other nations and tribes, 
illustrating a similarity of superstition that no 
one would deny. 

AN OLD TRUTH STRETCHED OUT OF SHAPE. 

And, what is especially amusing, he quotes a 
long passage from Archdeacon Farrar about 
the idolatrous practices of the Israelites, as if 
it were a remarkable confirmation of his own 
borrowed hypothesis, instead of being in fact 
the common understanding of Christians in all 
ages, and clearly taught by the Bible itself, 
namely, that in Farrar's quoted words, " a pure 
monotheism and an independence of symbols 
was the result of a slow and painful course of 
God's disciplinal dealings," the Hebrews being 
"under God's providence educated into pure 
monotheism only by centuries of misfortune 
and series of inspired men." The Bible often 
calls the Israelites a stiff-necked and untoward 



50 



THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL. 



generation This is the main point, but of 
course Huxley follows the unco' wise critics 
further, would make the Pentateuch a late 
fabrication, and picture the Israelites as mere 
heathen down to the time of the prophets — 
who, by the way, must have been very much 
inspired and non-evolutional to lift themselves 
and a nation from heathenism at once into the 
highest conceptions man can form. 

THE BEAUTY OF THE NEW SHAPE. 

On his theory he would have the Jehovah of 
Israel but an imagined spirit like a man in 
form and character, and but one of the spirits 
or Elohim of Sheol, though of a supposed 
superior and tutelar sort, which of course is a 
caricature of a truth possibly unknown to 
Huxley, but entertained by all Christians, that 
Jehovah appeared at times as the angel of the 
Lord and was the Son of God, or as expressed 
b} 7 Paul, in speaking of the wanderings of the 
Israelites, the spiritual Rock that followed 
them was Christ; and John says, "All things 
were made by Him." As to the seeming per- 
mission, under the old dispensation, of many 
things objectionable, and the anthropomorphic 
representations of Jehovah as moved by pas- 
sions, these are old difficulties a thousand times 
made clear, and by the Bible itself, as in Paul's 



HUXLEY A1STD HEBKEW TRADITION. 51 

discourse on Mars' Hill where he says that the 
idolatrous " times of this ignorance God over- 
looked ;" and the ascription of anger or jealousy 
to Jehovah is all explained in the frequent little 
words " as if," used often and italicised by that 
common-sense commentator, Albert Barnes. 
And, indeed, if we throw away the Bible and 
go to Nature alone, we shall find a great deal 
of that terrible as if; the two words are small, 
but the meaning vast ; Nature is as if angry 
with the wicked every day, and as if a jealous 
Nature, visiting the iniquity of the fathers 
upon the children unto the third and fourth 
generation. Let the objector first explain away 
Nature. 

CARLYLE'S PROTEST. 

The affected squeamishness that perverts the 
humane spirit of Christianity to a condemnation 
of the discipline God thought necessary under 
the old dispensation (even making the chosen 
nation his appointed executioners of vile and 
cruel idolatrous tribes, wedded to the wor- 
ship of Ashtoreth, their Yenus, and burning 
their children to Molech or Baal) should read 
the Latter Day Pamphlet, number II., of 
Thomas Carlyle 5 who was given neither to 
Bibliolatry nor, like many in these days, bitten 
with Bibliophobia ; he says, and the same may 



52 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



be said of Nature : " God himself, we have 
always understood, hates sin with a most 
authentic, celestial, and eternal hatred — a 
hatred, a hostility inexorable, unappeasable, 
which blasts the scoundrel, and all scoundrels 
ultimately, into black annihilation and disap- 
pearance from the sum of things. The path 
of it is as the path of a naming sword ; he that 
has eyes may see it, walking inexorable, 
divinely beautiful and divinely terrible, through 
the chaotic gulf of Human History, and every- 
where burning, as with unquenchable fire, the 
false and death-worthy from the true and life- 
worthy ; making all Human History, and the 
biography of every man, a God's Cosmos in the 
place of a Devil's Chaos. So it is in the end ; 
even so, to every man who is a man, and not a 
mutinous beast, and has eyes to see." And it 
is just because they do dimly see or feel it, as 
the Christianity-suckled and sentimental critics 
do not, that the heathen lacerate themselves to 
propitiate the powers of Nature personified in 
their gods. And that is why they and we need 
the Bible that, even in the assaulted Pentateuch, 
makes the mercy and justice of the whole 
Deity known in memorable language : " The 
Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, 
longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and 
truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving 
iniquity and transgression and sin, and that 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 53 

will by no means clear the guilty " (Exodus 34 : 
6-7). No higher conception of God is in the 
prophets, nor in the wisdom of the modern 
wise ; and this evolution of God was on Mount 
Sinai. 

A VARIETY OF ASSUMPTIONS. 

For the rest, it seems to be affected naivete, 
not to call it impudence, with which Huxley, 
in his preface, assumes that all discussion hangs 
on verbal inspiration of the Scriptures ; that 
the " plain sense " is the sense he puts on them ; 
and that it is becoming " impossible for men of 
clear intellect and adequate instruction to be- 
lieve, and it has ceased, or is ceasing, to be pos- 
sible for such men honestly to say they believe, 
that the universe came into being in the 
fashion described in the first chapter of Gen- 
esis " — as if Dawson, Dana, Guyot, and very 
many others of scientific eminence, must be 
set down as muddj^-headed, uninformed, and 
dishonest. With the same naivete, if not im- 
pudence, he speaks of the notion that the earth 
was repeopled from Armenia or Kurdistan, 
little more than 4,000 years ago, thus ignoring 
the limitation of the record to the ISToachian 
race, and the vast difference of interpretation 
in respect to Bible chronology ; and elsewhere 
he ignores the fact that geologists, by accurate 



54 



THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL 



observation of the recession of Niagara Falls 
and by data from other American rivers and 
from lakes, have fixed on 7,000 to 10,000 years 
as the period since the Glacial epoch, and the 
fact that there is no general agreement that 
vestiges of man are to be dated back earlier 
than the Glacial deposits — a reasonable or 
possible Bible chronology, if not Usher's, being 
thus confirmed. 

But the sublimest assumption, in view of 
their repeated and utter rout, is that the 
destructive* critics are above all others the men 
of scholarship and scientific methods — almost, 
if not quite, the only men of that sort — although 
much of the work of such men, as in Greek 
and Roman history and on Homer, proved for 
them a succession of defeats, and although 
the progress of Assyrian, Egyptian, and other 
discoveries, overthrowing much of the nega- 
tive criticism in the past, foretells the* final 
collapse of the later attempts to discredit the 
Scriptures as the record now stands. The 
negative and reconstructive critics may be 
men of prodigious learning and acuteness, but 
that this has been misapplied is believed by 
many scholars of probably equal learning and 
sagacity. And to call the destructive method 
the scientific one is comical in view of its re- 
sults hitherto. It has been applied to Shakes- 
peare, and might be applied to every author, 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 55 

even in comparatively recent times. Its 
"spirit of scientific investigation " is a jumping 
to conclusions, in which hardly two of the 
pundits agree, and reminds one of Huxley's 
faux pas in his Bathybius, an inorganic precip- 
itate mistaken by him for a low form of life, if 
not the primeval protoplasm itself. To them 
and to himself, his words may be addressed : 
" of infallibility, in all shapes, lay or clerical, 
it is needful to iterate with more than Catonic 
pertinacity, Delenda est" to which may be 
added, of the destructive critics, eos ipsos dele- 
veruntet delebunt. 

HUMORS OF THE NEW CRITICISM. 

Of course there must be some incidental 
good in their work, though it be only a pro- 
vocative of study in the right direction. But, 
outside of intentionally comic literature, there 
is nothing more comical than the successive 
hypotheses of the critics and the extravagant 
and absurd guesses and interpretations result- 
ing. The} 7 are omniscient, too ; Wellhausen says 
positively that the Jehovah-Elohim of Gen. 2 
"is due to an editor who desired to soften the 
abrupt transition from the Elohim of one nar- 
rator to the Jehovah of the other." Well- 
hausen must have been there at the time and 
had a talk with the " editor ;" and the beauty 



56 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



of it is that this editor must have gone on 
softening the transition all through the Old 
Testament, for there is the same or like varia- 
tion of the Divine name everywhere. And, of 
the first and second chapters, he says that, in 
the first, " vegetation and wet stand opposed, 
the plants springing up as soon as there is dry 
land," while in the second " the condition of 
vegetation is the moistening of the dry land " 
— "the earth, therefore, was originally not 
water but a parched desert " — all together a 
dry joke if he were not apparently in earnest. 

Canon Cheyne, in his article " Cosmogony " 
in the Encyc. Brit.,* suppresses most of the ab- 

* In a reference book, we should have the available 
space filled with details for our information and use, 
and, if matters at issue must be stated, the statement 
should be fair, pro and con — not a selection of points 
treated in the interest of the writer's individual 
or party view. Thus, under Cosmogony, we look 
for as complete an account of cosmogonies as the limits 
permit. Unfortunately, the Encyclopedia Britannica 
was edited in the interests of Biblical nihilists — so pro- 
nouncedly so that one is startled to find such a conces- 
sion as this: " The chronology of the composition of the 
Pentateuch may be said to center in the question 
whether the Levitico-Elohistic document [such a docu- 
ment is taken for granted] which embraces most of 
the laws in Leviticus with large parts of Exodus and 
Numbers, is earlier or later than Deuteronomy. The 
answer to this question turns almost wholly on archae- 
ological inquiries, for there is, perhaps, no quite con- 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION". 57 

surdities of heathen cosmogonies, and would 
interpret what he does give so as to coincide 
with Genesis, which he brings down to their 
level, thus seeking to abolish the vast contrast. 
The dividing of the waters from the waters 
in Genesis he identifies with the Babylonian 
cutting in two, which it seems was not the 
waters, but; the goddess who presided over 
them (Berosus, however, interpreting her as 
the sea), her two halves making heaven and 
earth. " The chief differences arise," he says, 
"from the polytheism of Babylonia, and yet 
some have seen a survival of polytheistic lan- 
guage in Gen. 1 : 26." He must adroitly slide 
that in, though it is plain that the purpose of 
Gen. 1 was emphatically to set forth a 
supreme Creator, and therefore the 26th verse 
must be interpreted as giving a plural of dig- 
nity or of intensity, or in some other consistent 
way.* " In another cosmogony," he writes, 

elusive reference to the Elohistic record in the prophets 
before the Exile, or in Deuteronomy itself. And here 
arises the great dispute which divides critics, and 
makes our whole construction of the origin of the 
historical books uncertain." Uncertain, after all. 

There is a Jewish tradition that when Moses was 
about to write the words " Let us make man," he cried 
out, " O Lord of the world, why wilt thou give men oc- 
casion to err about thy most simple Unity ?" — to which 
he received the answer, "Write as I bid thee; if any 
man love to err, let him err." A wise fable, for every- 



THE AGKOSTIC GOSPEL. 



" we meet with the woman Baau, 4 which 
is interpreted Night,' probably the bohu or 
chaos of Gen. 1, 2" — anything to identify myth- 
ology with Scripture. " The Old Testament 
contains three cosmogonies" — the third being 
Prov. 3, 19-20 ; 8, 22-31, and Job 15, 7-8. 
Referring doubtless to "let the waters bring 
forth," etc., he says : " The chief characteristic 
of Gen. 1 is the union of two apparently in- 
consistent phraseologies, the supernaturalistic 
and the evolutionary" — why inconsistent, 
even if they are there ? He might as well get 
the two into the natural, popular language in 
Gen. 3 — " thorns and thistles shall it bring forth 
to thee." He seeks to connect the Spirit of God, 
moving or hovering on the face of the waters, 
with the Polynesian " heaven-and-air god 
Tangaloa as a bird hovering over the waters," 
and remarks " in the earliest form of the nar- 
rative in Gen. 1 it may have been ' the bird 
of Elohim;' 6 wind' seems to be an interpreta- 
tion." Perverse guesswork could hardly go 
further. 

Such are specimens of these critics. They 
strain at a gnat and swallow many a camel, 
such as that the books of the law, excepting 
Deuteronomy (which they refer to near the 

thing the human mind can apprehend seems to be so 
presented that it can be perverted if one chooses to be 
perverse. 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 59 

time of King Josiah), were manufactured by 
or in the time of Ezra and bis assistants, all the 
local coloring and incident of the narrative 
having been craftily supplied by these redactors 
and priestly legislators, though such a fitting 
of circumstances and local facts (known more 
and more as true by new observations) and 
devised by such men is incredible. And the 
Jehovistic element in the Pentateuch they 
make not historical, but legendary. One would 
suppose that the craze of disintegrating the 
Pentateuch into Jehovistic and Elohistic and 
other fragments, while the fragment hypothesis 
lasted (Davidson, e.g., breaking up Gen. 31 
into thirty-five fragments by four writers), and 
the multiform vagaries of the next hypothesis, 
the supplementary, would have taught the later 
critics a lesson of prudence in attempting 
another solution ; but each one of them is 
eager to outstrip every other in the race of 
guesswork. About the only tangible things 
they have to start with, in assigning late 
authorship, are a few questions of names and 
a few explanatory comments (such as in Gen. 
36 : 31 — " before there reigned any king over 
the children of Israel ") which would seem to 
have been added by expounders or by copy- 
ists. 



60 



THE AGHOSTIC GOSPEL. 



HUXLEY AND BIBLIOLATRY. 

To return to Huxley, such remarks of his as 
that " wherever bibliolatry has prevailed, 
bigotry and cruelty have accompanied it," are 
not so original and uncommon as to require 
notice, except as inconsistent with his praise of 
veracity in the same paragraph. Every one is 
aware that bigotry and cruelty are character- 
istics of times and peoples, and, in Christen- 
dom, have been much more characteristic of 
Bible-lacking or Bible-suppressing times and 
places than any other ; further, that the un- 
chaining and dissemination of the Bible was 
contemporaneous with the new epoch ending 
in toleration and in the " freedom of thought " 
he speaks of in the next sentence — a freedom 
by no means restricted to those who reject or 
mutilate the Scriptures, which restriction is 
another insolent assumption, and characteristic 
of all sorts of Bible rejectors from the learned 
down through the common run of skeptics to 
mouthing spiritists, who all claim that free- 
dom and science are wholly on their side 
and bigotry and behind-date ignorance on 
the side of those who accept the Scrip- 
tures. 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION 61 



BIBLE PIETY, PAST AND PRESENT. 

But we need only go back to the time and 
community where and when our parents or 
grandparents lived, to know that the extremest 
veneration for the sacred book may coexist 
with modern enlightenment and with a most 
humane and tender spirit, and that it is felt by 
multitudes of the intelligent since the humani- 
tarian sentiment and movement became domi- 
nant. Blessed be their memory — those pious 
souls, exalted and beautified by daily com- 
munion with the Word of Life, of whom we 
their children are too seldom worthy in this 
time of multiform unbelief and unsettled 
opinion, when even orthodox editors and church 
dignitaries make smirking obeisance to every 
prominent and unscrupulous satirist of the 
venerable faith, or meet his assaults with cooing 
half-remonstrance. We all need toning up to 
eternal Truth by large draughts of its divine 
Bevelation, or,if that cannot be, by a Car- 
lylean clarion, or, if not that, by the simple 
beauty of Burns' " Cotter's Saturday Night," 
when 

" The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face, 
They round the ingle, form a circle wide; 
The sire turns o'er, wi 1 patriarchal grace, 
The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride." 



62 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL, 



And after they have chanted their hymn — - 

" The priest-like father reads the sacred page, 

How Abram was the friend of God oil high ; 
Or, Moses bade eternal warfare wage 

With Amalek's ungracious progeny; 
Or how the royal bard did groaning lie 

Beneath the stroke of Heaven's avenging ire; 
Or, Job's pathetic plaint, and wailing cry; 

Or rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire; 
Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre. " 

And well of such evening worship and 
Scripture-reading did Burns add : 

"From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs, 
That makes her lov'd at home, rever'd abroad." 

" Science and Hebrew Tradition," Huxley 
calls his volume. It is Huxley and Hebrew 
Tradition, or rather not even Huxley, but 
other critics. As he says in a saucy reply to 
the Duke of Argyll, " they take the lion's skin 
of scientific phraseology for evidence that the 
voice which issues from beneath it is the voice 
of science." Precisely thus is the name of 
science taken by those who use it to cover their 
forced and fallacious arguments against the 
best gift of God to man, the revelation of Him- 
self and of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. 

HUXLEY'S PROCLAMATION, 1894. 

In this connection may be noticed Huxley's 
article in Nature, Nov. 1, 1894, which assumes 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 63 



to be a review of the conflict of Eevelation and 
science to date, and a forecast of the future. 
The following remarks are substantially the 
criticism referred to in the preface of this 
book as by the writer of this review. 

The article no doubt gives a history of the 
subject as it has taken form in the minds of 
those who are adverse to Biblical faith. But, 
considered as a synopsis of the past and present 
state of knowledge and belief on the questions 
involved, it is wholly one-sided, unfair, and 
fallacious. 

He asserts that there has been an ever-widen- 
ing and long since impassable gulf between the 
old and the new, the reference being unmis- 
takably to the Bible as related to modern 
science. Omitting certain expressions that 
bear on the intellectual if not moral integrity 
of deceased compeers, who were nevertheless 
" very eminent and at the same time perfectly 
sincere men," we have the statement that as- 
tronomers smoothed over and ignored their 
perturbations. This goes back, probably, no 
further than early in this century, when 
space-penetrating instruments revealed the 
great extent and multiplicity of the universe — 
a difficulty that was emphasized while it was 
magnificently explained by Dr. Chalmers in 
his astronomical discourses. The simple truths 
of God's infinitude and infinite condescen- 



THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL. 



sion were all that devout astronomers needed 
to remember.* There was nothing to smooth 
over or ignore, either through perplexity or 
cowardly compromise. 

Next, we are told that the difficulty of 
maintaining peace became insuperable as uni- 
formitarian principles obtained the ascendant 
among geologists fifty years ago. As to catas- 
trophes, there are none in the Scripture ac- 
count of creation. As to great effects pro- 
duced" by the comparatively slow action of 

*Iq this brief criticism there was no room to offer 
other considerations, such as the relativity of distance 
or of size. As the author of " The Stars and the 
Earth " (second American edition, 1850) has shown, the 
universe might be reduced to a million millionth of its 
apprehended extent and the dimensions of its parts, 
and yet we should not perceive the change if we and 
our standards of measurement were proportionately re- 
duced; and so of time. Whatever may be the meta- 
physics of space and time, there is, as shown by this 
illustration, no absolute size, distance, and duration, so 
far as we can reason. Yet, lately, Spencer somehow 
' hurls the immensity of the universe at Balfour; and one 
of Huxley's witticisms was his reply to a low-church 
lady, in effect that, considering the size of the universe, 
the Almighty could hardly care whether a certain ritual 
rector turned his face to the east or the west in some part 
of the church service. In one of Huxley's papers under 
review it would seem that his trouble about astronomy 
was only that space-penetrating instruments suggested 
infinite evolutionary time, and thus had nothing to do 
with the littleness of earth and man. 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 65 

causes now in operation, the Biblical record 
offered no difficulty when it was observed that 
the word day is used in several senses, one 
much extended, just as it is elsewhere used in 
the Scriptures, and by us all ; in fact, had been 
so interpreted ages before modern geological 
research. 

The first two points made by Professor Hux- 
ley are thus obsolete, and are of no more force 
and importance than the old controversy about 
the earth revolving around the sun. They are 
so simple that a schoolboy can answer them. 
As to uniformitarianism, there are observations 
and inferences by trained naturalists who rec- 
ognize a more or less per solium progress. 
And it is just as undeniable to-day as ever, 
though denied, that the rocks testify (so far as 
they give testimony) to rapid or even immediate 
wholesale exterminations of life and introduc- 
tions of new forms, and this favors great 
impulses of life onward, more than it favors a 
slow development in some unknown region 
and gradual migration therefrom. 

The statement is made that the provisional 
peace between the old and the new was finally 
abolished by the publication of the " Origin of 
Species." ~No doubt it was so in the view of 
many who were indifferent to or arrayed 
against the Bible. But it is a matter of com- 
mon information that many men of science, 



66 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



and not a few clergymen, conceded the doctrine 
of descent, without any disturbance of their 
scriptural faith, and indeed find a high theology 
in that doctrine. Here, too, it is plain that the 
professor's ever-widening and now impassable 
gulf is no gulf at all. Moreover, the gist of 
the " Origin of Species" is natural selection, 
and this has lost much of its favor with scien- 
tific men, and is acknowledged by the professor 
to be no essential part of evolution. The very 
title of Darwin's book is " On the Origin of 
Species by Means of Natural Selection." 

The rest of his pronouncement is a reiteration 
of evolution as an historical fact as opposed to 
hypothesis. In the context, he inevitably uses 
the words theory, doctrine, problem, in place 
of the misleading phrase " an historical fact ;" 
so this can be passed by. The important 
question is, what does he mean by evolution ? 
He sa}^s without qualification " if man has 
come into existence by the same process of 
evolution as other animals." A succeeding 
clause is more explicit — "if that history [of 
man] is essentially natural." Both clauses are 
subjunctive, with undoubtedly the force of the 
indicative ; and, if this is so, we have to say, 
and with emphasis, that it is not an historical 
fact, nor a theory justified by facts, that life, 
sensation, and rational mind have corns into 
being by natural processes alone, and that man 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 67 

has progressed to his present stage by such 
processes only. Where is the origination of 
any one of the three to be found in the rocks, 
and how could the rocks give the processes of 
origin or anything but results ? And, if he 
includes the highest combined intellectual and 
moral development of mankind, where is it to 
be found except in the presence of the stimulus 
or atmosphere of faith in the one living and true 
God and the supernatural religion of His only 
Son, our Lord ? Can the sufficiency of natural 
causes be found in the study of external con- 
ditions and experimental study of variation, to 
which the article refers as large fields of in- 
quiry into the causes of evolution ? Will the 
fact, for example, that the pluteus of a sand- 
star fails to develop spicules and ciliated arms 
when a slight excess of potassium chloride is 
added to the medium, throw any light on the 
origin of life, sensation, or man's spiritual 
nature ? Will a million experiments explain 
why all things marched onward to and cul- 
minated in a God-like being who can compre- 
hend nature and so is above it ? 

The clause following the conditional ones 
above quoted is in these words : " The frontiers 
of the new world, within which scientific 
method is supreme, will receive such a remark- 
able extension as to leave little but cloudland 
for its rival " — the rival being the " other con- 



68 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



victions," the Biblical. The implication is that 
scientific method holds a minor place, if any, in 
the other convictions or in the mental habits of 
those who entertain them. "What is scientific ? 
The professor himself has well defined science 
in another paper : " Whatever doctrine pro- 
fesses to be the result of the application of the 
accepted rules of inductive and deductive logic 
to its subject-matter, and which accepts within 
the limits which it sets for itself the supremacy 
of reason, is Science." Now, evolution is a 
grand induction if it takes in all the elements 
that should, but in many minds do not find 
place. But, far grander and more all-embrac- 
ing is the induction that takes in not only 
nature in the naturalist's sense, but its Divine 
beauty and meaning, its moral element, and its 
correlations with man's higher nature as well 
as its manifold provisions for his lower and for 
his civilized arts ; and, not this only, but also 
physical geography as correlated with the 
stages of man's development aud the move- 
ments in his historical progress, and this 
especially as connected with the place, time, 
and work of Christ — all which, set forth by 
Guyot in " Earth and Man," is unanswerable 
by naturalism ; and, not only this, but the 
entire nature of man and his profoundest con- 
victions and highest aspirations, the manifest 
power in nature and history that works for 



HUXLEY AND HEBREW TRADITION. 69 

righteousness, the virtual miracle of one great, 
progressive, incomparable revelation in the 
Bible, the life, character, words, and work of 
the Redeemer, and the mighty power of his 
Spirit in the reformation of individuals and 
communities — yes, takes in the facts pointing 
to a Divine evolution itself as something that 
moved majestically on to its Divine outcome. 
All these are as truly facts as belemnite or 
hipparion ; and all point, not to a stream of 
conscious free reason in man that rises far 
higher than a source in unconscious material 
chance or necessity, but to the fountain of a 
foreseeing Reason in the universe and history 
— the God who at sundry times and in divers 
manners spake in times past unto the fathers 
by the prophets, and hath in these last days 
spoken unto us by His Son. Is all this likely 
to be " little but cloudland " ? If so, it wiil 
ever be a cloud that grows larger and brighter 
as the world rolls on, and in its luminous bosom 
is God. It will prevail as it has prevailed, and 
will rain such light and life that its rainbow 
promise shall be more and more fulfilled — 
the promise of a new heavens and a new earth 
wherein dwelleth righteousness. 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



II. 

HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 

The main point of Huxley's volume of col- 
lected papers entitled " Science and Christian 
Tradition" does not concern the exegesis and 
the credibility of the "New Testament. Unlike 
many deniers, he asserts and has asserted for 
some years that all things not self-contradic- 
tory in terms are possible, for example, even 
the turning of water into wine, inasmuch as, 
if the somewhat entertained hypothesis be 
true that all elements may be forms of one 
still more ultimate element, it is not impos- 
sible that carbon might be derived from the 
hydrogen and oxygen of water, and so the 
carboirvdrates of wine be produced — all 
which may be one of his solemn jests on his 
part. In general, he does not object to mira- 
cles in themselves considered, though at times 
he does so object, but to the evidence ; and 
this he sometimes scouts historically, and at 
other times changes his front and denies the 
possibility of evidence, or at least calls for 
proofs of a sort impossible in the past, such as 
the modern physiological tests of death in the 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 71 

instances of resurrection. He labors to im- 
pugn, the authenticity and authority, one or 
both, of the documents; elsewhere he pro- 
nounces these questions of little importance. 
" Not proven " — " lacking evidence," though 
" all things are possible," is the little song he 
sings, echoed by some newspapers and many 
nobodies.* This is the whole agnosticism of 
it. If you believe, it is purely a matter of 

* The utterly anchorless and absurd style of reasoning, 
due to Huxleyan influence, may be seen in the follow- 
ing extract from a prominent daily journal, noteworthy 
wholly aside from the serpent question: 

"Despite all this, the sea-serpent may be a myth. 
All these intelligent observers may have been mistaken. 
All these honest and truthful people may have deliber- 
ately lied about it. All things are possible. But if 
such be the case, it is one of the most extraordinary ex- 
amples of delusion and deception of which the modern 
world has record. That so many men, at so many re- 
mote times and places, should all have been deceived in 
exactly the same way and with exactly the same effect 
is perhaps credible. That they should have uttered 
falsehoods, separately conceived but perfectly agreeing 
with each other, is perhaps also credible. But one may 
surely be pardoned for regarding it as somewhat more 
credible that they really did see what they professed to 
have seen, and that the depths of the sea do indeed con- 
tain vast creatures of serpent-like form, such as these 
numerous witnesses have described." All things are 
possible! One would think the editor ironical if he 
were not sometimes serious in the same vein. 



72 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



faith ; on this ground only can you stand, 
though it has been and still is held by many 
men, as able as ever lived, that the strength of 
New Testament testimony far surpasses that 
of any other in all antiquity. 

THE AFFIRMATIVE SIDE. 

If the question be narrowed to one of 
authenticity of documents and competency of 
witnesses, the question is not one for a scien- 
tific guerrilla, but rather for scholars and in- 
vestigators who have made it their life-work ; 
and as their investigations are exceedingly 
voluminous, intricate, and learned, and are 
growing in volume as well as more or less 
modified every decade, especially on the radi- 
cal side, one can only take the general results 
as given by one or another camp into which 
the Biblical critics are divided for a century 
past, the one affirming and the other denying 
the authenticity and authority of some or all 
the New Testament books — not forgetting 
that the destructive criticism began outside 
of and hostile to the Christian churches, and 
has been most rampant in German universities 
and theological faculties that to a considerable 
extent are anything but Christian in our 
understanding of the term — promoted, too, by 
men who seemed ambitious to surpass each 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 73 

other in bold novelties. On the side of the 
affirmers is a mass of evidence, and also the fact 
that the deniers have been forced to abandon 
some of their most important denials; still 
more, the eighteen centuries of continually and 
immensely accumulating weight of testimony 
to the power of the historic Christ and Christi- 
anity in human experience, spiritual and moral, 
and the ever-brightening glory of the Christ- 
ideal — all which is unaccountable on the 
hypothesis of the New Testament as an unau- 
thentic scrappy mass of mixed fact and myth, 
the mythical element including much of the 
teaching and deeds of Christ, and even his 
resurrection and ascension. For him who 
drinks largely of the New Testament fountain 
no discussion is necessary; to him it is no 
impure or adulterated stream of life, and its 
purifying and strengthening virtues are its 
own evidence. 

NEW CONFIRMATIVE DISCOVERIES. 

On the side of the affirmers, too, are new dis- 
coveries from time to time. While this review 
is being written, appears "A Translation of 
the Four Gospels from the Syriac of the Sina- 
itic Palimpsest," by Mrs. Agnes Smith Lewis, 
who discovered the manuscript in the convent 
of St. Catherine, on Mount Sinai, in 1892. It 



74 



THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL. 



dates from the fourth century. Says the lit- 
erary editor of the New York Tribune, it 
represents, probably, a translation made in the 
second century, and is a matter of no ordinary 
interest to New Testament students ; also that 
two authorities, Nestle, of Ulm, and J. Rendel 
Harris, who are not given to hasty conclu- 
sions, think that it is the very first attempt at 
rendering the Gospel into Syriac; and the 
editor goes on to say — a noteworthy concession 
from a journal of Huxleyan proclivities : " If, 
as is most probable, this manuscript carries us 
back to the middle of the second century, it 
braces the conclusion, which, even before its 
discovery it was difficult to resist, and which 
was powerfully supported by the testimony of 
the Diatessaron, that our four Gospels were in 
wide circulation in Syria by the middle of the 
second century ; that, as Harnack observes, 
they had already taken a place of prominence 
in the Church, and that no others had done so; 
and that, in particular, the fourth Gospel had 
taken a fixed place alongside the Synoptic 
Gospels. In that case their composition must 
be assigned to a date closely approaching, if 
not identical with, that to which the Church 
has commonly referred them — the latter part 
of the first century. When the conditions are 
considered under which documents acquired 
recognition and currency in that age, the slow 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 75 

process of transcription and the consequent 
scarcity of copies, the imperfect and precari- 
ous means of communication between distant 
regions, the Oriental habit of relying upon 
oral tradition — fifty years is not an excessive 
allowance for the attainment of a circulation 
and influence such as should lead to translation 
into a foreign tongue and working up into a 
combined Gospel." Such is a single strand of 
the great argument in favor of the authentic^ 
of the Gospels. 

HUXLEY'S SINGULAR DISCOVERIES. 

The present object is to see what " the pro- 
tagonist in the struggle between truth and 
superstition " has to say, in the name of science. 
A quarter of the long preface of twenty-eight 
pages, preceded by a page from the now obso- 
lete Strauss, is devoted to a vindication of him- 
self in his usual style of semi-humorous postur- 
ing and phrasing, and here in the very conscious 
if not vainglorious character of protagonist. 
In the course of his experience he says that 
singular discoveries rewarded his industry — 
that " the ecclesiastical Moses proved to be a 
mere traditional mask," etc., as if it were a 
discovery of his own instead of the inference 
of the destructive Biblical critics. With deri- 
sive references to the day of Pentecost, he 



76 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



protests against the name " infidel " as objur- 
gatory, though it is difficult to understand why, 
unless it be that the dictionary sense (not in 
itself opprobrious) relates to an attitude that is 
really revolting to the sentiment of Christen- 
dom, and is felt to be so revolting ; otherwise, 
one would suppose that the name would be 
gloried in by one whose volumes cover its 
dictionary sense with constant emphasis. 

WHAT HE KNOWS ABOUT THE SPIRITUAL 
WORLD. 

Next, he attacks " the spiritual world," 
which he resolves into a demonic world, and 
this into swarms of evil and malignant spirits 
to whom this world has been given over, 
directed by a supreme devil — a belief without 
which the " theory of salvation by the Messiah 
falls to pieces." For this queer assertion he 
quotes John's epistle— " to this end was the 
Son of God manifested, that he might destroy 
the works of the devil " — as if that were the 
only or chief way the New Testament repre- 
sents the great and manifold mission of Christ. 
But he goes on to say that d priori notions 
about the possibility, or the impossibility, of 
the existence of a world of spirits have no in- 
fluence on his mind ; it is a question purely of 
evidence ; and, for most people, the question 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 77 

resolves itself into that of the trustworthiness 
of the Gospels. To which we can say amen, 
excepting the natural evidence of the Supreme 
Spirit, as manifest in nature, history, and the 
soul of man, and excepting the evidence we 
have of a present world of spirits made up of 
the spirits of living men, and the high prob- 
ability, for many reasons, of their continuation 
in another stage of existence as immortal. In 
other respects, neither Huxley nor we know 
anything about spirits outside of Kevelation, 
unless we find some further revelation in 
visions of the dying who behold bright beings 
unseen by others. Our belief, however, is con- 
firmed by many natural considerations, as 
shown in a following essay on arguments for 
the unseen. 

HIS ANALYSIS OF THE GOSPELS NOT NEW. 

He proceeds in a dozen pages to analyze 
elaborately the four Gospels as containing 
parts common to the four, other parts to three, 
others to two, and each its own peculiar pas- 
sages. And this he does, though he admits 
that the problem has been clearly stated and 
discussed, in works accessible to, and intelli- 
gible by, every English reader, and has been 
discussed during the last hundred years. Yes, 
and nearly sixteen hundred years ago, Eusebius 



78 THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 

made the same analysis of passages peculiar to 
one, and those common to two, three, and four 
Gospels ; and nearly seventeen hundred years 
ago Ammonius and Tatian compiled Harmonies 
of the Gospels, There has been no end to the 
vagaries of critics to account for the agree- 
ments and variations (no real contradictions) 
of the four narratives, some dreamers even 
imagining that there must have been at least 
eight or ten documents from which the Gospels 
were compiled, whereas it is well enough 
settled that Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote 
their versions within thirty or forty years after 
the death of Christ ; and (whatever writings 
may be referred to in Luke 1) it is most reason- 
able to suppose that until then no full written 
form had been thought necessary, and the 
synoptic statements had very likely come to be 
the fixed oral repetition by the apostles and 
disciples in recounting the life and words of 
the Lord. 

THE GOSPELS SEVERALLY. 

Why there were four Gospels, respectively 
for the Jews, the Romans, the Greeks, and, 
later, John's for all advanced Christian com- 
munities, has been abundantly explained.* 



* Most clearly, compactly, and with fresh explications, 
by the able managing editor of the Standard Dictionary, 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 79 

Enough here that it is not a matter simply of 
certain old manuscript copies dating back to 
the fourth century. The evidence superabounds 
that the Gospels were known to and quoted by 
pupils and associates of the apostle John and 
by others immediately after his day, and were 
known as the four in the second century and 
regarded as the authentic production of those 
whose names they bear. The early evidence 
is strong in favor of Matthew ; and, as to John, 
the old fight against the genuineness of his 
gospel has been given up by many scholars of 
the first rank ; yet Huxley says no impartial 
judge can go beyond the admissions of a pos- 
sibility about the latter, and of the former he 
says that he u cannot discover that any com- 
petent authority now maintains that the 
apostle Matthew wrote the Gospel that passes 
under his name." Surely his reading must 
have been all on the negative side, or else he 
is bluffing in the style of those who pretend 
that all scholarship or all science is on their 
radical side — an impertinence to hearer or 
reader, and an indignity to good opposing 
authorities, or, shall we call it, a feature of 
intellectual pretense and exclusiveness like the 
social sort in city life. 

Dr. D. S. Gregory, in his book " "Why Four Gospels ?" 
republished by Funk & Wagnalls, New York, 1890. 



80 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



HIS ACKNOWLEDGMENT. 

However, Huxley must have due credit for 
a very sensible acknowledgment in concluding 
his preface, to wit : " For myself, I must con- 
fess that the problem of the origin of such very 
remarkable historical phenomena as the doc- 
trines, and the social organization,which in their 
broad features certainly existed, and were in a 
state of rapid development, within a hundred 
vears of the crucifixion of Jesus : and have 
steadily prevailed against all rivals, among the 
most civilized nations in the world ever since, 
is, and always has been, profoundly interest- 
ing; and, considering how recent the really 
scientific study of that problem, and how great 
the progress made during the last half-century 
in supplying the conditions for a positive solu 
tion of the problem, I cannot doubt that the 
attainment of such a solution is a mere question 
of time." 

And we may add that the vast and se- 
rious problem will hardly be solved on his 
view of the G-ospels as a fungous growth or 
weedy tangle of ignorant, superstitious, and dis- 
crepant legends ; also, that the net result in 
the progress of the study has been to confirm 
the New Testament. 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION-. 81 



HIS SUPERNATURALISM. 

Following the preface is the u Prologue." 
He deplores, or seems to deplore, polemical 
writing as more or less of an evil, and as hav- 
ing an air of unfairness in presenting only one 
side ; and he has hesitation in reprinting his 
essays, though he does reprint them in one col- 
lection in 1892, and in another collection with 
additions in 1894. He thinks it necessary 
when the interests of truth and justice are at 
stake. How much truth and justice are sought 
by him can be inferred from this rapid review. 
Then he resolves all his controversy into one 
question — the natural versus the supernatural ; 
reduces all religions to information about 
supernatural beings (setting aside certain eth- 
ical concomitants) and their interference with 
ordinary events ; and he asserts that all this is 
more extensive and exact and its influence the 
greater as we go back in time and to the lower 
stage of civilization. After a survey, from his 
standpoint, of the contests of the Reformation 
and subsequent times down to the " evangel- 
ical supernaturalism " of Wesley and Whitfield, 
he goes on to criticise a publication in favor of 
church authority by thirty-eight clergymen of 
the Established Church of England. 



82 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



WHAT IS THE SUPERNATURAL ? 

He is quite right in making the supernatural 
the great point at issue. That is what he is 
fighting all along ; and that is what the nega- 
tive criticism of reverend and other critics, as 
represented by the most " advanced, 5 ' is really 
driving at, under whatever pretext of literary 
criticism.* But what is the supernatural, in 
its breadth and height ? As already noticed, 
Huxley would concentrate it in M demonology," 
and secondarily the miraculous. But, the 
supernatural in its highest meaning and full 
glory is the God above all, the Infinite Eeason, 
Eight, and Love, manifest in nature, history, 
and the soul — the Unknown God of whom 
Paul said at Athens, not he is unknowable, but 

* The most advanced in England is the Reverend T. 
K. Cheyne, Canon and Oriel professor in Oxford. In 
his " Founders of Old Testament Criticism," he is very 
impatient with the slow progress of his fellow-workers 
in England, such as Doctors Davidson and Driver. 
He reminds one of a personal anecdote told by Huxley. 
On a certain occasion he was belated, and hailed an 
Irish "car," saying to the driver as he jumped on: 
"Now drive fast, I am in a hurry." Whereupon he 
whipped up his horse and set off at a hard gallop. 
Nearly jerked off his seat, Huxley shouted, " My good 
friend, do you know where I want to go?" "No, yer 
honner," said the driver, " but, anyway, I am driving 
fast." 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITIOH. 83 

" Him declare I unto you ;" and who is further 
and fully declared in His Son, the brightness 
of His glory. Compared with Him, angels, 
good or evil, are as nothing, and, compared 
with His all-upholding and all-directing power, 
miracles are but a few incidents adapted to the 
people and times when they Avere necessary. 

In its grandest and all-embracing sense, the 
supernatural is not an information common to 
all religions and more extensive and exact as 
we go back in time to the lower stage of 
civilization. Just the contrary. And the Bible 
religion is not, like other religions, an extensive 
and exact information about supernatural 
beings ; just the contrary, as the reader may 
see by comparison in the third essay of this 
volume, on pseudo-revelations of the unseen. 

WHAT IS THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION ? 

As every one ought to know, the Christian 
religion, not referring here to its system of 
theology, differs wholly from all other religions 
in two supreme respects : first, it makes an in- 
ward spiritual renewal the prime requisite, in- 
stead of observances ; and, secondly, it makes 
love, love to God and man,- the fulfilling of 
Divine law, instead of slavish obedience to 
maxims and prohibitions. In particular, it 
teaches that the Old Testament law is to be 



84 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



taken in its comprehensive spirit, and that it 
was a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ, 
convincing of sin and educating in holiness. 
The constant attempt to classify and identify 
Bible religion with all religions, either shows 
an ignorance of its real nature and scope, or 
else is a trick unworthy of a man of ordinary 
intelligence and truthfulness. And what is 
the " evangelical supernaturalism " of Wesley 
and Whitfield, and of all preachers of the real 
Gospel ? Is it discoursing on angels and devils? 
How often has the reader heard that? Is it 
not rather the preaching that " God so loved 
the world that he gave his only -begotten Son 
that whosever believeth on him might not 
perish, but have everlasting life " ? By common 
consent of Christian teachers, it is summed up 
in that, along with Christian ethics. 

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION NOT DECAYING. 

There has been no progressive elimination of 
the supernatural from its originally large occu- 
pation of men's thoughts, as Huxley saj 7 s, if it 
be taken not in his low sense but in its high 
and worthy sense ; on the contrary it has ever 
a larger place in high thought, and also in the 
evangelical movements and influences that 
reach down to the bottom of society and afar to 
all nations, as never so extensively before in the 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 85 

history of the world, even enlisting innumer- 
able youth and lay men and women in work 
that once was almost limited to the clergy. 
Its mightiest recent development came as an 
unlooked-for, unlabored-for, simultaneous revi- 
val in a large part of this country, in 1857-8$ 
— a thronging of all classes and beliefs, or un- 
beliefs, to places of prayer — a joyous, singing, 
lay revival, new in history, with which the 
clergy had little to do as initiating and pro- 
moting, and even confounding their methods 
and maxims, as the great revivalist, President 
Charles G. Finney, confessed. And the great 



* Not a movement originating in and spreading every- 
where from the Fulton Street prayer meeting, as some 
suppose. In no city was the upheaval more character- 
istic and powerful than in New Bedford — a city where 
the dominant influences had long been so adverse that 
the evangelicals hardly dared call their souls their own. 
By the advice of the writer of this, a union meeting was 
appointed solely to bring the evangelical churches more 
into co-operation, and with no thought of a large atten- 
dance, much less of an imminent revival — no thought 
whatever of any New York meetings. An unexpected 
crowd came, and the Spirit of God almost literally as a 
rushing mighty wind. Strange that the peculiar nature 
of the simultaneous movement everywhere in the North, 
and its relation to the civil war, and to what may 
almost be termed a new dispensation, has been over- 
looked by many, who only talk of the financial crisis 
and the Fulton Street meeting. 



86 



THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL. 



wave swept on year after year in the midst of 
our civil war, making every camp a praying 
and singing camp-meeting ; and it still rolls on 
in all sorts of religious and charitable lay 
activity and organizations in every denomi- 
nation, or outside of churches — one crest of 
the flood gathering in the fifty thousand young 
" Christian Endeavorers " from all the States, 
met together jubilantly in Boston this summer 
of 1895.* It was no mere reaction from busi- 
ness disasters in 1857-58, as the cynical say, for 
no such a phenomenon was any of the revivals 
in previous business reverses, and none of the 
old type of revivals has occurred generally 

*The Boston Journal, a very unsectarian sheet, said on 
this occasion: Its 39,394 societies form an army more 
powerful than that of the Crusaders, and it is an army 
organized on nineteenth-century principles and trained 
to fight against existing evils. The Christian religion 
does not decay in spite of the predictions of false 
prophets. It has greater potency, greater scope, and 
greater vitality at the close of this century than ever 
before, and it is gaining steadily." And the Boston 
Herald, also unsectarian, remarked that ' ' none of the 
various addresses have revealed anything more than 
the regular evangelical beliefs, but there has been an 
intense devotion to the central truths of Christianity, 
and it has been an earnest appeal to Christ and human- 
ity that has been uttered on the platform." Witness 
also the growth of the Moody institutions and conven- 
tions at Northfield, and the like elsewhere, and the un- 
doubting Bible faith that inspires them. 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 87 



since, even in the sore reverses of 1894. It was 
a great step of Christianity onward, bringing 
out the multitudinous forces of the churches. 

And in this land the churches have kept 
pace with the population all along, never ap- 
parently feeling the shock of the naturalistic 
phase of new science that came thirty-six years 
ago, even as they suffered nothing in strength 
from other new phases several times earlier in 
this century, and nothing from the destructive 
criticism that has been chattering and clatter- 
ing for half a centurj^. There has been and is 
no d} T ingaway of supernaturalism in its worthy 
sense, and certainlv not in manv of the best 
scientific as well as the best philosophical and 
theological minds,* however many individuals 
have been led into the " materialistic slough " 
or into the agnostic apathy. And even the 
distorted shadows of the supernatural in theos- 
ophies and spiritisms have a great following, 
never greater. Huxley thinks that the extant 
forms of supernaturalism will undoubtedly die 
hard. Yes, it will be very hard. But he 
thinks that science will kill it all. It does not 
seem really to have suffered from science so 
far, in general, or in the minds of many leaders 
and students of natural science. 

* Witness the magnificent Phi Beta Kappa oration, 
M Recognition of the Supernatural in Life and Letters," 
by Dr. R. S. Storrs, at Harvard, 1881, 



88 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



THE RELIGION OF NATURALISM. 

Incidentally, he shows how little religion " 
there is in naturalism and how much the 
Divine Revelation is needed, when he says : 
" Nature, so far as we have been able to attain 
to any insight into her ways, recks little about 
consolation and makes for righteousness by 
very round-about paths." This he remarks in 
reference to the complaint that the destructives 
would take from us the solace of religion and 
the foundations of morality, and his remark if 
true shows that the complaint is justified. 
Nothing, on his showing, would be left but 
pitiless nature and very evasive evidence of the 
moral in the universe. It could hardly be as 
bad as that, however, as witness a foregoing 
quotation from Carlyle, not to speak of the 
apostle Paul in the first chapter of Romans; 
but it is all that would remain to Huxley and 
his genus, if Christianity were blotted out. 
And this appears further in the rest of the 
essay, where he would make consciousness 
and reason but stages in a purely natural prog- 
ress, man no different in kind from animals, 
though differing in degree, the moral in nature 
presumably as absent now as in the ages before 
man, morality but tribal self-preservation in 
its origin and ground, and religion having no 
essential connection with it. If all this is the 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 89 

upshot of earth's and man's progress upward, 
and is to be accepted as the final result of 
science, one would say that the Fall (which he 
scouts), if it did not occur in Adam's day, is 
now coming to pass. The doctrine is degrad- 
ing and beastly to the last degree. 

HE EULOGIZES THE BIBLE. 

The prologue closes with nothing less than 
high praise of the Bible, strange to say. After 
throwing discredit and contempt upon it in 
these essays, he says : " It appears to me that 
if there is anybody more objectionable than 
the orthodox Bibliolater, it is the heterodox 
Philistine, who can discover in a literature 
which, in some respects, has no superior, noth- 
ing but a subject for scoffing and an occasion 
for the display of his conceited ignorance of 
the debt he owes to former generations. 
Twenty-two years ago I pleaded for the use of 
the Bible as an instrument of popular educa- 
tion, and I venture to repeat what I then said: 
Consider the great historical fact that, for 
three centuries, this book has been woven into 
the life of all that is best and noblest in Eng- 
lish history," etc. In the course of a couple of 
pages in this strain, he remarks : " By the 
study of what other book could children be so 
much humanized V 9 etc. — this word being used 



90 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



in the scholastic sense, probably ; and again : 
" Throughout the history of the western 
world, the Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, 
have been the great instigators of revolt 
against the worst forms of clerical and polit- 
ical despotism. The Bible has been the Magna 
Charta of the poor and of the oppressed; down 
to modern times, no state has had a constitu- 
tion in which the interests of the people are 
so largely taken into account, in which the 
duties, so much more than the privileges, of 
rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for 
Israel in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus ; no- 
where is the fundamental truth that the 
welfare of the state, in the long run, depends 
on the uprightness of the citizen so strongly 
laid down. Assuredly, the Bible talks no 
trash about the rights of man ; but it insists 
on the equality of duties, on the liberty to 
bring about that righteousness which is some- 
what different from struggling for ' rights ;' on 
the fraternity of taking thought for one's 
neighbor as for one's self." 

He proceeds to illustrate the democratic in- 
fluence of the Bible in history down to the 
time when " from the sixteenth century on- 
ward, the Protestant sects have favored 
political freedom in proportion to the degree 
in which they have refused to acknowledge 
any ultimate authority save that of the Bible." 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 91 

But he would confine its power to its " appeals, 
not to reason, but to the ethical sense " — as if 
its democratic influence was due to its injunc- 
tions rather than to its great doctrines of one 
Heavenly King and all men as subjects and 
immortal children of that King eternal, im- 
mortal, invisible, the only wise God. 

It is to be hoped that Huxley's praise of the 
Scriptures was sincere. If it was, it is very 
difficult to regard his very satiric essays as at 
all serious. It is not the point that he excepts 
here the " cosmogonies, demonologies, and 
miraculous interferences," It is that here he 
expresses profound respect for a book which 
elsewhere, as we have seen and shall see, he 
caricatures in the language of a common re- 
viler — for example, speaking frequently of the 
Gadarene scene in the Gospels as that of the 
"possessed pigs." And this book, pervaded 
all through by the supernatural, and, as he 
thinks, by gross errors, he recommends for use 
in schools, and asks " by the study of what 
other book could children be so humanized ?" 
When and where is he serious ? Possibly he 
was in earnest in the school matter, since he 
would have the Biblical school instruction in 
lay hands, in the hope and belief, as he says, 
that the theology and the legend would drop 
more and more out of sight. But, if the the- 
ology of the Bible and all that he considers 



92 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



legend were dropped, there would not remain 
much of either flesh or skeleton ; it would be a 
residuum much like that in the ingenious versi- 
fier's rhyme for Timbuctoo, making a cassowary 
eat the missionary, "skin and bones and hymn 
book too." 

HIS TWO WORLDS. 

The next two essays, "Pseudo-Scientific Real- 
ism" and "Pseudo-Science," have little to do 
with the title of the book, " Science and Chris- 
tian Tradition." The first contends against the 
assumption that natural laws are entities in- 
stead of records of the observed order of nature, 
and discusses natural catastrophes ; and the 
other essay takes up the same subjects in the 
same or other relations, which will be noticed 
later. Hany of the incidental remarks might 
be reviewed. He admits that modern science 
recognizes two worlds, the physical and the 
psychical, with no bridge yet found between 
the two ; elsewhere he objects to cutting the 
universe into two halves, the natural and 
supernatural ; yet, so far as the psychical man 
is above nature as comprehending it, control- 
ling it, creating it anew by creative ideas, and 
exercising (under any tolerable theory) a God- 
like freedom, man is of one world, the natural, 
and of another world, the supernatural, just as 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TEADITIOK. 93 

Huxley in his way makes two worlds of the 
physical and the psychical ; and talking of 
worlds, since man is man only in his divinest 
elements, one is reminded of George Herbert's 
" Man is one world, and hath another to attend 
him." In short, we cannot get rid of a nature 
and a supranature, against which latter Huxley 
inveighs. 

On another page, he speaks of the supersen- 
sible theological world which was created, or 
rather grew up, during the first four centuries 
of the Christian era. The language would 
seem to imply that the seed and stalk as well 
as the flower dates back no further. But if he 
means only that which w T as peculiar to the 
clemonology of a corrupted Christianity, the 
words supersensible theological world are like 
many other of his invidious characterizations. 

HIS RULES OF NATURE. 

Again, he says : " The admission of the 
occurrence of any event which was not the 
logical consequence of the immediately antece- 
dent events, according to these definite, ascer- 
tained or unascertained rules which we call the 
4 laws of nature,' would be an act of self-destruc- 
tion on the part of science." What is his 
"logical consequence?" In these essays he 
contends that there is nothing but observed 



94 



THE AGKOSTIC GOSPEL. 



order (meaning sequence) of events — that we 
know nothing about any force or necessity 
behind them, nor of cause as cause. What do 
his rules of nature amount to ? His rale is not 
a rule proper but a mere sequence of facts, thus 
far, or rather as far as we happen to know — a 
sense not at all in the verb rule (from old 
French for Latin regulo, regulate), and it does 
not exhaust the secondary noun sense of an 
ordinary course of things, for this is and must 
be understood to imply some principle or cause 
in continuous action, as when we say selfishness 
is the rule in business or drouth is the rule in 
August. He says: " We commonly hear of the 
law of bodies falling to the ground by reason 
of the law of gravitation, whereas that law is 
simply the record of the fact that, according to 
all experience, they have so fallen (when free 
to move), and of the grounds of a reasonable 
expectation that they will so fall," and he dis- 
cards the phrase " attraction of gravitation " 
because we know nothing of any attraction. 
It is, then, simply, that number one fell, and 
number two fell, and number three, and so on ; 
that is all we know. What ground of what 
reasonable expectation ? for it is nothing but 
a record of the past thus far, in his view. What 
reason ? There is no solid ground for reasoning 
about the future on his theory, and expectation 
is mere conjecture. The only sure ground is 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 95 

that like causes produce like effects, and that 
cause implies properties of substance as powers 
to produce effects. 

HIS INCONSISTENCY ON THIS SUBJECT. 

His agnosticism, which would eliminate all 
cause and force, and of course the Supreme 
Cause, as beyond the scope of knowledge, 
should be consistent. He talks much along 
here of the " store of energy " in nature, and 
the conservation of energy. But what, on his 
scheme, do we know of energy or its store or 
of its conservation ? He refers to muscular 
work; but what do we observe? Muscle is 
exercised ; waste is ejected ; those are the 
observable facts ; but what can we observe 
of a molecule of assimilated food liberat- 
ing a part of the greater energy needed 
to hold its many atoms together, when it 
splits up into simple carbon dioxide and water, 
a part taking the form of muscular contrac- 
tion and a part the form of heat % All this 
is taught by science and is doubtless true, but 
it is not what we observe. It is what we in- 
fer, and rightly, of causes and effects behind 
observed sequence. What do we observe of 
the molecule, the energy in it, the amount of 
this needed, the liberating, the splitting, the 
change to muscular work and to heat ? Here 



96 THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 

is a string of things out of the reach of obser- 
vation, involving a string of reasoning about 
causes and effects, and absurd without the idea 
of cause, which is intuitive and fundamental in 
observing, in thinking, in science, and inevita- 
ble in the mental experience hourly of every 
man, scientific or unscientific—a necessary 
idea, and its excitation just as much a matter 
of experience as, the sight of a stone falling. 
His own language refutes himself on many a 
page ; for example, speaking of possible geo- 
logical catastrophes, he says : " Not a link in 
the chain of natural causes and effects would 
be broken." Here he has causes and links and 
a chain of them. Science is above all the 
knowledge of causes ; first, it is observation of 
facts ; secondly, correlation of these into sys- 
tem and law ; thirdly, explication of causes ; 
and, contrary to Huxley, by some eminent sci- 
entists in recent years, science proper has been 
resolved into the study of force. 

CONDITIONS] ARE NOT CAUSE. 

Nor can cause be reduced to the conditions 
attending change. Pat thawing dynamite at a 
stove, and the composition of the nitro-glycer- 
ine, are a set of conditions for a disastrous 
result, and the disaster requires us to infer 
some action from something causal, something 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 97 

of power in action, to which the conditions are 
elements and occasion. Beginning back fur- 
ther with the compounding of the explosive, 
and putting all together, we have onlj chem- 
ist, glycerine, nitric and sulphuric acids, ab- 
sorbent siliceous particles, Pat, shanty, stove, 
heat, noise, flying fragments of Pat and shanty. 
That is all we get in a record of sequence of 
facts considered as all we can observe ; science 
w r ould end there, in Huxley's philosophy, in- 
stead of beginning there, as it does. The heat 
vibrations communicated to the chemical com- 
pound, causing its molecules to vibrate until, by 
reason of the weak combining power of the ni- 
trogen, the chemical structure breaks up and its 
atoms rush together into new combinations with 
a mighty impact that is converted into heat vi- 
bration, so powerful as instantly to force the 
new molecules into vibrations so energetic that 
they assume at once a gaseous state of great 
volume— all this is causative, known by rea- 
sonable inference from the observable facts ; it 
is behind and beyond the mere sequence of 
these. And there are abundant facts that 
point straight, not only to secondary or effi- 
cient causes like these, but to a Supreme Cause, 
an Infinite Beyond-all. Everything points 
thither. Agnosticism should begin at the 
beginning if it discards this final conclusion. 
Huxley knows a great deal about things be- 



98 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



hind observation in the world of phenomena; 
it is a large part of science. But if science is 
to be agnostic it should recognize nothing but 
visible fact — nothing but cartridge, Pat, shanty 
and the resulting fragments. 

GEOLOGY SHOWS INTERVENTION. 

Under "Pseudo-Science 55 (mostly a repeti- 
tion of the subject of natural law), Huxley 
asks : " Is the Duke of Argyll prepared to say 
that any geologist of authority, at the present 
day, believes that there is the slightest evidence 
of the occurrence of supernatural intervention, 
during the long ages of which the monuments 
are preserved to us in the crust of the earth ?" 
Yes, the Duke could say it. High names of 
geologists, too familiar to be mentioned, and 
all geologists as well, and evolution itself, could 
be adduced to show that the geological evidence 
legitimately goes back to a time when doubt- 
less life was not, and when, probably later, sen- 
sation was not, and, later, rationality was not ; ; 
and there is plenty of high authority, among 1 
geologists and others, for the belief that these 
factors intervened — were from creative power 
— were not in that inorganic matter which we 
know and which always must have been what 
it now is, in its properties. From the stand- 
point of biology, one of the cluster of sciences 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 99 

that make up geology, the case is well stated 
in the last five pages of Wallace's excellent 
book on and in favor of " Darwinism." 

HIS EXAMPLES OF NATURAL LAW. 

On other pages we have some of Huxley's 
illustrations of law. From him we must sup- 
pose it science ; in others it would be pseudo- 
science. " I presume that it is a law of nature," 
he says, "that 4 a straight line is the shortest 
distance between two points.' " Omitting the 
confusion here of the concept line with the 
concept distance, it may be asked if he is jok- 
ing. He seems to be in earnest, and he makes 
a definition in geometry a law of nature ! Im- 
mediately following this, he has another and a 
proper law of nature, that the mass of matter 
remains unchanged whatever modifications it 
may undergo ; and he remarks that " it is quite 
possible to imagine that the mass of matter 
should vary according to circumstances, as we 
know its weight does." Annihilation of a part 
of the mass is then a matter of " circumstances." 
In formal physics, mass is defined as the meas- 
ure or expression of the quantity of matter in 
a given body ; and gravity and the amount of 
force necessary to move a body may vary, 
hence of course the measure or expression ; 
but the persistent amount of matter in a given 



100 THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 

body is fundamental to the idea of mass. Fol- 
lowing this instance, we have the law that all 
men are mortal, and he would be glad to be 
informed of a necessity of death that can be 
deduced from biological considerations, and 
mentions the lowest forms of life, referring 
doubtless to the endless self-division of some 
of these. But the proposition is that all men 
are mortal, and if there be no necessity of death, 
such as the apparently inevitable shrinking and 
hardening of tissues, with loss of vital force, in 
the decline of life, a good many old people 
would like to know it. But Huxley did not 
believe in any vital principle or force, for the 
fallacious reasons well answered in Dr. James 
H. Sterling's essay " As Begards Bioplasm,'' 
and requiring no notice here. Dr. Oliver Wen- 
dell Holmes said that death "is as much a 
physiological necessity as life." 

THE DILEMMA HE OFFERS. 

Further on in Huxley's lucubrations about 
law, we have a dilemma offered us : if mind 
cannot affect matter, " it follows that volition 
may be a sign, but cannot be a cause, of bodily 
motion ;" if it can 5 " then states of consciousness 
become indistinguishable from material things, 
for it is the essential nature of matter to be 
the vehicle or substratum of mechanical en- 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 101 

ergy." He had declared, as we noticed, that 
the physical and the psychical are two w r orlds, 
and the bridge between them had not yet been 
found. But here he offers us two bridges, 
between which we may take our choice. First, 
volition is but a sign (a sort of preceding echo 
or a reflection or symptom or rocket or waved 
rag) of a bodily motion that originates only in 
matter ; or, secondly, mind is matter, because 
matter is moved by mechanical energy, and 
he knows, if nobody else, that the energy can- 
not be under the control of anything above 
matter. Rather flimsy bridges and a foolish 
dilemma. 

PRAYER. 

The next succeeding paper, " An Episcopal 
Trilogy," begins as a love-feast with two 
bishops, whose discourses on science Huxley 
heartily approves, except that he thinks that 
one of the bishops should not have presumed 
that there is any scientific objection to the 
efficacy of prayer on the ground of inconsist- 
ency with the order of nature, its efficacy being 
no more impossible than miracles, and the 
only objection to both being lack of evidence. 
Well, the numerous affirmed instances of 
answer to prayer, other than spiritual, can be 
endlessly discussed as authentic or not, and as 



102 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



answers or only coincidences when authentic. 
Believers in the Bible will find instances there. 
But it is rather remarkable that both apolo- 
gists and objectors on any ground, if we grant 
but for argument that there is an omniscient 
and omnipotent God, do not remember that 
He is the inspirer of effectual prayer, and that 
the prayer and the thing prayed for alike 
came into His eternal order, so that there is 
no change of the order ; and if a soul truly 
gets into communion with God, influenced by 
Him, there will be no heaven-inspired prayer 
that is not effectual. What to us if the answer 
be provided for to-day or from all eternity ? 
It was the testimony of that cool, clear-headed, 
eminently logical man, Charles G. Finney, 
president of Oberlin College, who began his 
career as a skeptical lawyer, and was converted 
by his chain of reasoning, that, in his nearness 
to God, he found at times that he could not 
pray with his whole heart for certain persons, 
though having no prejudice against them, and 
that he could offer the effectual fervent prayer 
in every case where conversion followed. Per- 
haps there is much in this that few experience, 
but the philosophy of it is the clear philosophy 
of effectual prayer, whether for rain or re- 
generation. It is not a present miraculous or 
fortuitous but an everlasting Divine coinci- 
dence 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 103 



HIS POSSIBLE GOD. 

Huxley thinks that there may be, for aught 
he knows, " somebody, somewhere, who is 
strong enough to deal with the earth and its 
contents as men deal with the things and 
events which they are strong enough to modify 
or control [they control ?— if volition is but a 
sign of bodily motion, and this originates only 
in mechanical energy, nothing higher], and who 
is capable of being moved by appeals such as 
men make to one another." But, he adds, 
" this belief does not even involve theism, for 
our earth is an insignificant particle of the 
solar system," etc. Elsewhere, if memory 
serves, he thinks there may be a being who 
can act on the solar system. Of course, he is 
speaking only of possibilities, not of his belief. 
But, here we have the immensity of the universe 
appealed to, when that immensity and its 
measurements are purely interrelative. The 
interesting thing, however, is that " this belief 
does not even involve theism." Let it go at 
that. If there may be a being who can control 
the physical earth, or the solar system, he is 
quite enough God for us, and we " see no great 
difficulty in supposing " that he or his Eternal 
Father might as well control the universe, 



104 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



THE BISHOP AND MIRACLES. 

The third bishop is not named ; Huxley re- 
fuses to name him, having a very sensitive 
shrinking " lest 1 fall under high censure for 
attacking a clergyman," though he leaps boldly 
into the arena when it is only a well-known 
duke or a premier. This bishop inveighs 
against " a non-miraculous, invertebrate Chris- 
tianity " with just indignation, but he is in- 
felicitous in saying that Christianity is " essen- 
tially miraculous," when he should have said 
(perhaps did say) that it largely involves the 
supernatural in its highest sense, was verified 
by the Incarnation, Kesurrection, and Ascen- 
sion, and was attested by miraculous incidents, 
subordinately, to those w T ho "require a sign." 
The bishop also asserts that Christianity " rests 
on miracles" — quite right if he refers to the 
Divine incarnation and to the .Resurrection and 
Ascension, as fundamental facts, but too loosely 
expressed if without qualification. "We may 
also add that it was necessary that Christ 
should show his Divine power over all things, 
including diseases of body as well as of soul, 
and death and the powers of darkness. 

In this connection Huxley claims that deniers 
of the miraculous may, as highly as others, 
estimate the purely spiritual elements of the 
Christian faith. "What, more or less, are these ? 



HUXLEY AXD CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 105 

— only the Christian virtues and moralities, 
and love to God and man, whether we believe 
in God or not ? Christianity, in the only docu- 
ments and spiritual history of it we have, 
claims that those elements are by and through 
a Divine Man who is the Light and Life, the 
one spring and realization of those elements. 
That is the warp and woof of Christianity; 
that is the building, and to desupernaturalize 
it and hold up its practical virtues as all, is to 
pull out some of the stones and hold forth these 
as the whole architectural structure. It is to 
take specimens of the superstructure as the 
foundation, " which is Christ" and all that he 
is shown to be in the only records we have of 
him and by his apostles and their associates. 

SCIENTIFIC MEN AS SHARP AND VERACIOUS. 

On the next page comes in a claim that sci- 
entific men are those who keep the estimate of 
the value of evidence up to the proper mark. 
No doubt their training, like that of the law, 
or the detective service, promotes a habit of 
rigid questioning ; but they are as liable as 
any persons to be warped by preconceptions 
and for other reasons, especially when they 
take up theory or a controverted question, as 
Huxley's discussions illustrate. But, if there 
be any Christians who have not enough good 



106 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL; 



evidence on which to ground their faithj 
enough to satisfy them, the sooner they dig for 
it the better. He also mentions the higher 
standard of veracity among scientific men. 
Undoubtedly science promotes this in men who 
are not given to sophistry and sophistication, 
as too often in controversies like those now 
under review. 

SCIENTIFIC ACCURACY. 

He might have made a further point just 
here in respect to accuracy of statement, in- 
volving also strict ascertainment of truth and 
fact, and beyond that a wise reserve, as too 
often insufficiently favored by a scholastic or 
literary habit of mind. For this reason among 
many others, the writer of this review, twenty- 
five years or so ago, recommended in a publi- 
cation the establishment of a professorship of 
natural science in every theological seminary, 
even if not much time could be devoted to it 
by the students. Andover for a time, and 
perhaps other seminaries, came to have such a 
chair, but only of the relations of religion and 
science, and occupied probably by a clergy- 
man of no scientific training. From other 
studies, Dr. G. F. Wright has been transferred 
to a similar chair in the theological depart- 
ment of Oberlin, and most appropriately, hav- 



HUXLEY A2U> CHKISTIAK TRADITION. 107 

ing made original investigations in field 
geology. Divinity students, whether or not 
they have had a collegiate education, should 
be kept in sharp touch and practical sympathy 
with physical science, not apologetics alone, in 
order to get something of an inside view and 
to feel the force of natural fact, as well as to 
cultivate adamantine accuracy. Loose ascer- 
tainment and statement of natural, mental, 
social, or celestial knowledge — for example, 
what we really know from the Bible of hades, 
or an intermediate state, or other than the 
spiritual features of heaven — are too common, 
especially overstatement; and we find the tend- 
ency so strong that even a biological investi- 
gator and the protagonist of agnosticism is 
loose in his language and in his " logicking," 
as some one has termed a false or petty use of 
logic. 

HUXLEY'S VERACITY. 

On the same page with his claim for himself 
and fellows to veracity, he says of the devils 
entering the herd of swine, and of the blasted 
fig-tree, that these rest on the evidence of doc- 
uments of unknown date and of unknown 
authorship — as if date (granted by most critics 
of all sorts) and the authorship, with sufficient 
approximation of the former and verification 



108 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



of the latter, were not established by a multi- 
tude of very early witnesses who could and 
would have rejected the documents, if not 
authentic, as they did reject many documents 
of invalid authority, the apochryphal. Hux- 
ley's unqualified words imply that we are 
wholly at sea, altogether in the dark, about 
the date and authorship. He says a profession 
of belief on the evidence is immoral. If so, 
we have two immoralities — this, and his char- 
acterization of the New Testament documents ; 
and which is the pardonable one it is not diffi- 
cult to see. So, in the next paragraph, he 
characterizes orthodox Christianity since the 
second centu^ as " that varying compound of 
some of the worst elements of Paganism and 
Judaism, molded in practice by the innate 
character of certain people of the western 
world." Here is an indiscriminate and terrible 
charge, which scientific morality and accuracy 
ought to have guarded and made clear. The 
only light we get is in the context about 
miracles, and the contest of early Christianity 
with idolatry, and the present fetishism of the 
Eoman populace, and images in the Roman 
churches. Apparently, he would spread the 
odium of fetishism over the orthodoxy of all 
Christendom, including the purest in English- 
speaking nations, if it so much as includes a 
faith in the trustworthiness of the Gospels. So 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 109 

much for his scientific truthfulness. The rest 
of the essay is given to a discussion that relates 
to Murray's theory of coral-reef formation, to 
which the third bishop had referred ; also to 
self-vindication in regard to Bathybius. 

EGINHARD'S MIRACLE-WORKING RELICS. 

The fifth essay, entitled "The Value of 
Witness to the _ Miraculous," is a long account 
of the stealing of relics of saints and the mira- 
cles worked by the relics in Germany, in the 
ninth century. It was derived from a printed 
copy from a manuscript copy dating within a 
century after the death of the author, Eginhard 
or Einhard by name, whose contemporary his- 
tories of Charlemagne and that time are here 
said to be regarded as trustworthy. Outside 
of the New Testament, Huxley does not doubt 
manuscript copies a century after the events ; 
and he does not hesitate to speak of this man, 
living over a thousand years ago in the midst of 
the Dark Ages, and conniving at theft as an 
accessary after the fact, as " a witness whose 
character and competency are firmly estab- 
lished, and whose sincerity cannot be doubted," 
and contrasts him and his writings with Mat- 
thew, Mark, Luke, and John, and their Gospels ; 
" all that we know of these persons," he 
recklessly says, " conies to nothing in compar- 



110 *THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEl* 

ison with our knowledge of Eginhard ;" and he 
repeats his opinion about the authenticity of 
the Gospels. Certainly this is the height of 
impudence to set any man who is acknowledged 
to have been groping in the grossest mediaeval 
superstitions and self-convicted of receiving 
and using relics that he knew were stolen from 
churches — to set him and our knowledge of him 
and his testimony above the apostles and their 
associates, trained by the purest teaching of 
Him who, according to Huxley himself and by 
common consent, is the Ideal Man, the embod- 
iment of truth, and who were enduring all 
things in testimony of facts the truth of which 
they must have known, and which carried 
conviction to men of all classes, high or low, 
learned as well as unlearned, even the skeptical 
Greeks and worldly cosmopolitan Eomans — 
that testimony which certainly had evidence 
enough to revolutionize the old Pagan world. 

WERE THE JEWS CREDULOUS ? 

" It cannot be pretended," Huxley adds, "in 
the face of all evidence, that the Jews of the 
year 30 a.d., or thereabout, were less imbued 
with the belief in the supernatural than were 
the Franks of the year 800 a.d." Yes, it can. 
The Jews were for the most part either utter 
formalists, the Pharisees, or utter skeptics, the 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. Ill 

Sadducees ; and they scoffed at the miracles of 
Christ, even against the evidence of their 
senses. As Athanasius Coquerel well said 
in his reply to Strauss : " It was, of all antiq- 
uity, the epoch that most resembles our nine- 
teenth century — one of doubt, incredulity, and 
derision, of want of respect for all creeds, one 
wherein all was called in question, when the 
desire of innovation was general, and whose 
proper representative is Lucan, who has been 
styled the Yoltaire of the Greeks. . . . That 
epoch is precisely the one in which, through 
the ever-advancing victorious arms of the Ko- 
mans, the east and the west came most in 
contact ; and the spirit of Europe arrived to 
modify that of Asia, and to teach it to doubt, 
to believe only after inquiry, and to prefer 
facts to theories. ... It was in unbelieving 
Europe that Christianity took root at once, 
and established itself in a decisive manner ; it 
was in the towns most polished, corrupt, and 
learned — Corinth, Athens, and Rome — that the 
Gospel found its first adherents, its earliest 
martj^rs." And he goes on to show that the 
ancient simplicity of the faith of the Israelites 
was gone, and the people were occupied with 
what was most positive in the world, namely, 
political interests. It was the time and scene 
where all nations mingled, and all the old was 
breaking up, and the Greek language and cul- 



112 THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 

ture pervaded all, so that the Gospels even 
were written in Greek. Eginhard's narrative 
dates " about the year 830," and to put such 
a period as that of the apostles on a level or 
beneath the intellectually most stagnant one 
of the Middle Ages, when even the schoolmen 
(from 843 on) had not begun to illumine it — 
this goes well with the monstrous depreciation 
of the apostles in favor of the obscure, infatu- 
ated, and theft-approving Eginhard. And the 
essay fitly closes with an attempt, practically 
if not in so many words, to put George Fox 
and the apostle Paul on a level with Eginhard, 
in respect to superstition. 

HUXLEY'S ORIGINALITY. 

The sixth essay, on " Possibilities and Im- 
possibilities," is a repetition with variations of 
the agnostic doctriae that everything is pos- 
sible that is not contradictory in terms, how- 
ever this or that may be improbable. In fact, 
this and all the succeeding essa} r s are mainly 
repetitions of the preceding, with little or 
nothing new in substance, and the criticisms 
about discrepancies in the Gospels, as well as 
the arguments generally, are acknowledged to 
have no novelty. Huxley himself says, "I 
have been careful to explain that the argu- 
ments which I have used in the course of this 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION". 113 

discussion are not new ; that they are historical 
and have nothing to do with what is com- 
monly called science ; and that they are all, to 
the best of my belief, to be found in the works 
of theologians of repute " (p. 330). So the 
great prestige of this scientist has no weight 
in his Bible discussions, and these dwindle to 
rags of Strauss, Baur, Reuss, Yolkmar, Renan, 
etc., who are more or less in discredit with 
many learned critics of all shades of opinion. 

It would be tedious to go step by step 
through these remaining half-dozen papers. 
On almost every page there are the twists and 
contortions of fact, reason, and Scripture, 
which are always a good part of the stock in 
trade of objectors of every species, reminding 
one of the readiness which the little India- 
rubber faces, sold by curbstone peddlers, can 
by a slight twist or pinch be made ludicrous. 
This is the patent method of showing up 
orthodoxy ; and the flexibility of a Revelation 
in history, song, parable, epistle, for the mass- 
es as well as for the w T ise, one that is not cast 
in the iron of rigid logic and philosophy, and 
the ease with which even a philosophical 
theology drawn from that Revelation can be 
caricatured, render the method very available 
to an unlearned skeptic as well as to a Fellow 
of the Royal Society. 



114 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



CHOOoES THE WORST INTERPRETATIONS. 

These concluding six essa} 7 s resolve them- 
selves mostly into discussion of the case of the 
demons entering the herd of swine, hence the 
subject of demonology in general, and with it 
the attitude of agnosticism. It becomes more 
and more laughable — the manner in which 
the swine incident is brought up and with 
increasing frequency all through this volume 
until the last two essays, which are wholly 
given to it. Huxley, if not the swine, becomes 
thoroughly possessed, namely, with what he 
calls the "possessed pigs," the "bedeviled 
pigs," the " pig affair." It is plain that either 
he had taken no pains to look up the subject 
as variously understood and treated by the 
learned, or else he deliberately ignored all 
views and interpretations except the most 
objectionable. One of the two suppositions 
explains his usual style of treating the Bible, 
as in Genesis and elsewhere. Thus, in this 
volume he twice refers to the Bene Elohim 
(sons of God) of Gen. 6 : 2, as implicated in 
vicious " commerce " or " gallantries," and in- 
terprets it as between spirits and women. 
But this old Cabalistic and Gnostic notion, 
found in the apochryphal Book of Enoch, 
used by Milton, and poetized by Byron and 
Hoore ? makes up two and the worst interpre- 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 115 

tations out of seven, the other five being 
reasonable and decent, and therefore would 
not have suited Huxley's purpose. 

THE GADARENE DEMONIAC. 

So here we have no hint of the variety of 
explanations offered by men high in learning 
and orthodoxy as well as b}^ others. The Hux- 
leyan conception of a passage of Scripture is 
sure to be the lowest one possible, and would 
probably take literally the entering of Satan 
(horns, hoofs, and all) into Judas " after the 
sop." The extreme view would be that a 
legion of devils had found their way into the 
Gadarene man, their presence making him a 
maniac; they were sent into the swine; the 
swine were thus crazed into drowning them- 
selves ; and, as they were valuable stock, be- 
longing, as Huxley contends, to a Greek colony, 
the act, he thinks, was a very immoral one on 
the part of the Savior of mankind, if the nar- 
rative is at all trustworthy. The extremes of 
theory are this on the one hand, and, on the 
other, the purely figurative or accommodative, 
in regard alike to this and all the demoniacal 
possessions in the New Testament. It is enough 
to mention here only the intermediate view of 
Neander in his " Life of Christ," doubtless 
accepted by many, namely, that the demoniacs 



116 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



were persons diseased physically or mentally, 
or both (so far a view agreeing with the physio- 
logical and pathological), but that supernatural 
influences of evil, implied in the Bible every- 
where, had a point of contact with the soul, 
operating there through a general influence on 
the race, and especially on many individuals 
whose whole organization was deteriorated and 
unstrung by a life of uncleanness — the soul, he 
says, being " in itself supernatural in its hidden 
essence," and in its relations with a spiritual 
world. In this Gadarene case the distracted 
maniac, believing himself torn by a host of de- 
mons, and speaking one moment in his own 
person and at another moment as if in theirs, 
was soothed by the compassionate presence 
and conversation of the Savior, of whom he 
may have had some knowledge as the great 
Physician of body and soul, though he was at 
first disturbed and averse on recognition ; and 
the healing was so Divine and so far complete 
that he desired to remain with Christ. Whether 
there was a literal or an adaptive and spiritual 
meaning in the words " Come out of the man, 
thou unclean spirit," and the word " Go," and 
whether there was a literal entering of a legion 
of spirits into two thousand swine, are points 
where such men as Lardner, Paley, Newcome, 
Dean Milman, and others in orthodox ranks, 
have interpreted the case in the light of the 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 117 

demoniac's conceptions and of the treatment 
adapted to these. Neander only says: "There 
is a gap here in our connection of the facts. 
Did Christ really participate in the opinions of 
the demoniac, or was it subsequently inferred, 
from the fact that the swine rushed down, that 
Christ had allowed the evil spirits to take pos- 
session of them? It is certain, at any rate, that 
they did cast themselves over the precipice 
into the sea, as if driven by an invisible power." 
On the main point, but on a high plane of ex- 
position, Neander holds to the supernatural as 
involved in such cases. 

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SWINE. 

As to the destruction of the swine, our view 
must depend on what we think of Christ. If 
he was but a man, and if he was responsible for 
the destruction, we must agree with Huxley. 
But, without the slightest infringement on the 
rules of morality, if Christ was the one God- 
man, with the spiritual salvation of men as his 
great mission on earth, and subordinately their 
temporal good, the case is wholly changed. As 
God, or representing God, he had the right of 
eminent domain over all things, the cattle upon 
a thousand hills, and their owners as well. 
And if the purpose in this case was Divine and 
humane, fulfilling his mission, what more is 



118 



THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL. 



there to say ? A profound impression, as the 
narrative shows, was made upon the people, 
" the whole multitude of the country of the 
Gadarenes round about," and though at first it 
was dread of Christ, who shall say what the 
ultimate effect was when the man " went his 
way and published throughout the whole city, 
how great things Jesus had done unto him"? 
What was a herd of swine to the possible 
great benefit to the owners themselves ? Of 
course if Christ had been a man only, without 
the sovereign authority and proprietorship of 
God represented in him, it would be inexcusa- 
bly doing evil that good might come, though 
the evil was property loss and the good eternal 
gain. As for the man himself, very likely 
having a common superstition that the demons 
could only content themselves as inhabiting 
material bodies, the transfer he asked and its 
fulfillment, whether seeming or real, was a 
step in his psychical restoration without which 
he might have believed himself still haunted. 

STRAUSS AND HUXLEY ON TRANSFER OF ILLS. 

Strauss, a much bigger though bygone pro- 
tagonist to whom Huxley defers, in a work on 
animal magnetism makes a curious comment 
on the Gadarene miracle : " Without believing 
in the reality of the demons, Weise is disposed 



HUXLEY AND CHKISTIAN TKADITIOIT. 119 

to admit the entrance of the disease into the 
herd of swine, and he refers to the authority 
of Kiesser, who grants the possibility of the 
demoniacal malady being transmitted to others, 
and even to animals. The devolution on 
animals of certain corporeal ills is manifested, 
as I know from sympathetic medicine. . . . 
In regard to the transfer to animals of the 
organo-physic condition of the human body, 
there is, I know, a foundation for it, inasmuch 
as horses and other animals are seen to partici- 
pate in what is called the second-sight, a faculty 
possessed by some of the Scotch and Danes." 
This is a curiosity of literature as coming from 
the first great demolisher of the Gospels. 

Huxley's transference of ills is of course 
mock-serious. Of this " Gadarene affair " he 
says : " There are physical things, such as 
taeniae and trichinae, which can be transferred 
from men to pigs and vice versa, and which do 
undoubtedly produce most diabolical and 
deadly effects on both ; for anything I can 
absolutely prove to the contrary, there may be 
spiritual things capable of the same transmi- 
gration, w T ith like effects." Another of his 
brilliant jokes, though in accordance with his 
assertion that miracles are only to be objected 
to as unproven, is his labored effort to show 
that five loaves might have grown, like vege- 
tables, so as to feed five thousand. But he 



120 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



says : " Proof must be given (1) of the weight 
of the loaves and fishes ; (2) of the distribution 
to 4,000 or 5,000 persons, without additional 
supply, of this quantity and quality of food ; 
(3) of the satisfaction of these people's appe- 
tites; (4) of the weight and quality of the 
fragments," etc. This is interesting only as 
showing the man and his method in combating 
Scripture. What, in the past, could be verified 
after this fashion? If he was the least bit 
serious in such stuff, " proof must be given " 
(1) of the exact condition of Huxley's brain at 
the time of writing it ; (2) of the width of his 
mouth ; (3) of the non-contraction of his 
risorius and zygomatic muscles ; (4) of the 
quiescence of his diaphragm. To know the 
truth about the battle of Waterloo, we must 
dig up and weigh the bones and dust of the 
slain, and must know the capacit} 7 of Napoleon's 
brandy-flask and how many centiliters of spirit 
remained in it when found, and the per cent, 
of strength, etc., etc. In the same line of 
humorous quasi-reasoning Huxley loses all re- 
spect for himself and his religious readers by 
arguing that the miraculous conception of 
Jesus by the Holy Spirit has an analogy in the 
parthenogenesis of insects. Such is the man 
who is looked up to as the protagonist in the 
struggle between truth and superstition. 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 121 



BELIEF IN EVIL SPIRITS. 

It is by no means the object of this and the 
preceding review to take in even summarily 
the great and manifold arguments for anything 
in the Bible, but only to show up and cursorily 
test some of the principal points made by the 
conspicuous man who assumes to speak ad- 
versely and at large in this field in the name 
of science. In respect t© his long and repeat- 
ed diatribes against the existence of a world 
of spiritual beings and influences, it would be 
enough to say that the almost universal belief 
in such beings and their influences and mani- 
festations, from primitive down to the present 
time, is a great fact not to be snuffed out nor 
dismissed with a scientific sniff. Further, the 
fact that this belief has taken a thousand fan- 
tastic forms, among savages, or orientals, or 
mediaeval priests and painters, or in recent 
spiritisms, is no argument against a real basis 
for it — no more than the fact that medicine 
has always run and still runs into absurd 
whimsies and practices, is a refutation of all 
medicine, or that the immense amount of ob- 
solete or existing pseudo-science and scientific 
conjecture, and the protean changes of accept- 
ed scientific theory from day to day, are a 
reduction of science to absurdity. The most 
extravagant superstition may be the distorted 



122 



!THE AGKOSTIC GOSPEL. 



form of a truth. In the light of science, we 
came to laugh at astrology ; with further light, 
we find that the positions of the planets, as 
acting on the sun, may indirectly act upon our 
meteorological conditions and thus widely in- 
fluence human affairs. 

A POSSIBLE INDUCTIVE THEORY. 

A large induction, when men of science 
learn to take in all human fact, may confirm 
the existence of invisible influences of evil, just 
as in the material world the perturbations of 
Uranus revealed a great unseen planet. If the 
natural evidence is only confirmatory of Scrip- 
ture, not demonstrative, it may still yield a 
high probability, for example, that supernatu- 
ral influences may be hypothesized to account 
for the unnatural enmity of many of the learned 
and ethically Christian toward a Eevelation of 
God which they at times confess to be on the 
whole a vast blessing to man and a supreme 
marvel in history — the enmity becoming in 
them relentless and almost maniacal ; also, to 
account for the unnatural hatred of many, 
otherwise amiable and reasonable, toward an 
own child or parent, or others ; likewise, the 
unnatural delight of many well-trained, intel- 
ligent, and even refined persons in cruelty or 
foul wickedness, even in the most disgusting 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 123 

crime against nature, as if for its own sake ; 
further, the diabolic fascinations and false 
lights with which sin deceives and mocks those 
who know better than to be misled by it ; still 
further, the vast and complicated systems of 
vice, wrong, oppression, and false religion, 
built up age after age by short-lived men look- 
ing only to self and the present, but as systems 
showing a far-reaching and all-embracing plan 
worthy of a master spirit of darkness — the 
most astonishing illustration being the long- 
elaborated and highly elaborated perversions 
of Christianity itself — the great gift of God to 
man for man's salvation. And perhaps it will 
be a part of some future great induction that 
Satan has succeeded in getting himself so hor- 
ribly horned and hoofed, and so mixed up with 
wit and fable, as to make himself incredible. 

ORIENTAL DUALISM. 

Of course, Huxley, like all the rest of them, 
talks of the old Oriental dualism of a principle 
or deity of good and a principle or deity of 
evil. This has nothing whatever to do with 
the Bible, which represents the Adversary as a 
creature under the power of God, permitted to 
tempt those who, in yielding, are at least con- 
jointly " drawn away of their own lusts and 
enticed." As to the origin of evil, a disbeliever 



124: 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



is just as much bound to explain it as the 
believer. The Bible offers an explanation in 
speaking of pride as the condemnation of the 
devil — his original exalted position being his 
temptation, perhaps, as often happens with 
men, and freedom to choose being simply the 
ultimate fact. The odium of a dualistic prin- 
ciple, and of the origin of evil, as well as that 
of the exaggerated notions in the past of the 
power of the Adversary over nature, does not 
belong to the Bible — not even to the poetic 
Book of Job, where it is God putting forth his 
hand that qualifies the putting of Job in the 
Adversary's hand. Further, all the odium of 
every sort that pertains to savage or mediaeval 
demonology, as a horror that has hung over 
the life of men, and the cruel atrocities at- 
tending a belief in witchcraft, have nothing to 
do with the question of the supernatural, how- 
soever largely they make up the coloring and 
incident in the history of man's extravagant 
and perverted imaginings, or features of his 
cruel and persecuting spirit in the past, exhib- 
ited in the social and political as well as in the 
religious domain. Huxley's whole treatment 
of the subject is narrow, unfair, and utterly 
unscientific, in the respects now mentioned. 
Besides, as already remarked, the spiritual 
world centers in God, and is involved in man's 
higher nature and immortality, as well as in 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 125 

the nature and mission of the Redeemer, all 
which, rather than demonic incidents, are the 
great truths of Christianity. 

HUXLEY'S GENERA AND SPECIES OF CHRIS- 
TIANITY. 

As to Christianity, Huxley is or affects to be 
quite at loss to understand what it is, and 
speaks of the Christianity of this and that book 
of the New Testament as very different 
things, especially that of Peter and James as 
compared with that of Paul, and he makes 
out a list and table of the different genera and 
species of Christianity in the early Christian 
ages, as these were more or less affected by 
Judaism. 

The only thing here of any pertinence what- 
ever is the old discussion, emphasized by Baur 
sixty-four years ago, about the Pauline and 
Petrine points of view, never of any importance 
except as presenting some different sides of the 
same early Christianity. The misunderstand- 
ings of the relation between Christianity and 
Judaism, narrated in the book of Acts and the 
epistle to the Galatians, were temporary and 
soon resulted in harmony among the apostles. 
So far as the epistles of Peter and James offer 
evidence there is nothing at even seeming 
variance with Paul, except the well-known 



126 



THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL. 



condemnation of dead works by Paul and of 
dead faith by James, not in the least contra- 
dictory. In fact, in James' epistle we distinctly 
find the great Pauline doctrines of Christian 
liberty and justification by faith, and in Peter's 
the same non-Judaistic doctrine of liberty and 
also of Christians as a holy priesthood, offering 
up spiritual sacrifices (another favorite Pauline 
doctrine), and a recognition of Paul by name, 
his writings as good Scripture, the perversion of 
them as the thing objectionable, and his good 
work in establishing those addressed in " the 
true grace of G-od wherein ye stand." Huxley 
makes the Christianity of Peter and James 
simply Judaism plus Christ as Messiah.* 

* On one page he will have it that the final command, 
"Go ye, therefore, and make disciples of all nations," 
is spurious because he thinks that Peter, John, and Paul 
could not have known of such a command, else they 
would have appealed to it on the Gentile question ; but, 
in a note on another page, he shows that the command 
did not necessarily affect that question ; he quotes Dr. 
Newman approvingly, to the effect that Peter and the 
Jerusalem Christians might have interpreted the words 
to mean the propagation of Judaistic Christianity. So, 
also, he argues against the genuineness of the Sermon 
on the Mount because it says that every jot and tittle of 
the law must be fulfilled, a saying that he thinks, if 
authentic, would have been appealed to by Peter and 
John as justifying the Judaism he attributes to them 
even after they were further enlightened. But how 
"fulfilled?" The meaning he puts on the words is 



HUXLEY AtfD CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 12? 

There is not a particle of " Judaizing " in the 
three epistles, and, as every docile and intel- 
ligent reader of the New Testament knows, its 
Christianity is substantially one throughout, 
including the "Johannean" (John's), which 
gives it more especially from the contem- 
plative side of inner philosophy and exalted 
spiritual experience, as Peter and James chiefly 
present it from the practical side, and Paul 
from the systematic and every side. 

WHO ARE BIBLICAL SCHOLARS? 

What is the great requisite of a Biblical 
scholar, in order that he may be trustworthy ? 
According to Huxley it is that he be a German 
or a Hollander, for in no English-speaking 
country, at least, can a critic be supposed to be 
independent. Granting this absurdity, how 
about eminent German scholars who find 
reason to hold to the integrity of the Bible and 
little or no reason to adopt the results of their 
destructive brethren ? 

WITNESS TO THE MIRACULOUS . 

The essays return to the subject of miracles. 
And what are requisites of a trustworthy wit- 



gratuitous and inconsistent with other teachings of 
Christ and the New Testament. This is science. 



128 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



ness to the miraculous ? According to Huxley, 
"neither considerable intellectual ability, nor 
undoubted honesty, nor proved faithfulness as 
civil historians, nor profound piety." (He has 
Eginhard here in mind, who, he assumes, 
had all these virtues, though this man con- 
nived at theft and his profound piety was 
apparently profound superstition.) The one 
requisite is that the witnesses must not have 
a belief in the miraculous. But suppose 
they come to have it, against preconceptions, 
by positive ocular proof? And how about 
having an utter disbelief in it, like Huxley's ? 
Would that be a good qualification — a free- 
dom from " presupposition of observation and 
reasonings "? There are those of whom it may 
be said now as of yore, " neither will they be 
persuaded though one rose from the dead." As 
a fact, there were multitudes in the time of 
Christ and his apostles who, so far from expect- 
ing and eagerly accepting wonders, as in the 
: case of Eginhard, were confounded by the 
: Christian miracles, and the scoffing witnesses 
were forced to admit the reality while they 
attributed it to magic or Satan. 

The subject is a large one and has often been 
treated in full, more particularly with reference 
to the distinctive justifying purpose in the first 
promulgation of Christianity. Enough that 
false miracles in all ages are a temptation to 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 129 

disbelieve, but do not disprove the worthy and 
well-attested that bore witness to the Divine 
mission of Christ and his apostles, before the 
greatest of all miracles came to pass, acknowl- 
edged by Huxley and all, namely, the preva- 
lence and power of the Gospel over the old 
pagan world and over all potencies down to our 
day — including also its reforming, enlightening, 
and saving power, which the disbeliever does 
not feel nor acknowledge, but which for ages 
has been manifested and to-day is as manifest 
and mighty in all ranks of society as ever, ren- 
dering a repetition of miracles as unnecessary 
now as at any time since the first ascendancy 
of Christianity. 

NO WITNESSES TO BE ACCEPTED. 

Notwithstanding these and many other 
weighty considerations, Huxley won't accept 
any witnesses, any proof. Believing d priori 
that any miracle is possible, he decides that a 
miracle itself discredits any witness ; in short, 
there never can be any proof of a miracle ; it 
is too absurd anyhow, though conceivable and 
possible ! He says : " I repeat what I have 
already more than once said, that the age and 
authorship of the Gospels has not, in my judg- 
ment, the importance which is so commonly 
assigned to it [he has himself been battling 



130 



THE AGKOSTIO GOSPEL. 



this age and authority all along] ; for the 
simple reason that the reports, even of eye- 
witnesses, would not suffice to justify belief in 
a large and essential part of their contents ; 
on the contrary, these reports would discredit 
the witnesses." lie refers, as everywhere, to 
the Gadarene miracle for example and as 
something extremely improbable ; and he goes 
on to hedge himself digressively by trying to 
show that there is too much likeness and too 
much unlikeness in the three synoptic nar- 
ratives. But his dictum stands : their reports 
of a miracle would discredit the eye-witnesses. 
On this principle there can be no admissible 
testimony to anything beyond the ordinary 
observed course of things, even though this be 
but the past causeless sequence he makes it. 
The King of Siam was quite right in denying 
that water can be converted into a solid, 
called ice ; the persons who reported it to him, 
by that very report, were self-evidently lack- 
ing in " their capacity as observers and as in- 
terpreters of their observations." Huxley's 
position amounts to Hume's great objection to 
miracles, which Huxley elsewhere rightly con- 
demns as begging the question. 

HUXLEY'S SCIENCE. 

Such is Huxley's " Science and Christian 
Tradition," which ; taken piecemeal or all to- 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 131 

gether, is neither science nor even Huxley's 
science, but a revamping of others' criticisms, 
as he confessed in order to give the criticisms 
some show of weight and authority. He re- 
marks that " the men who make epochs, and 
are the real architects of exact knowledge 
[exact should apply only to the mathematical 
sciences], are those who introduce fruitful ideas 
and methods." Huxley, by the way, was not 
in this or any respect an epoch-making man, 
even in natural science, notwithstanding his 
many researches in biology. He proceeds : 
" As a rule the man who does this pushes his 
idea, or his method, too far ; or, if he does not, 
his school is sure to do so." In this he refers 
to Strauss, Keuss, and the other negative 
critics. Precisely so. And, in Huxley's highly 
peppered ragout of their extravagant crit- 
icisms, we have a cheap hash of odds and ends, 
whereas we came to his table expecting a good 
English roast of Koyal Society science, the 
piece deresistance that would challenge carving- 
knife, teeth, and stomach to do their utmost. 

THE APOCALYPSE. 

Eeaching the end of his poor feast, it is 
noticeable that he makes slight reference to 
the end of the New Testament, where the seer 
looks forward to all coming time, as the first 



132 THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 

chapter of the Bible looked back to the begin- 
ning, which was largely discussed by our 
author. But his little reference is sufficiently 
contemptuous, as might be anticipated ; and a 
vindication of the last book of the Bible from 
so contemptuous a dismissal calls for some- 
what extended remark. Speaking of geologi- 
cal catastrophes in the second essay, he says it 
is conceivable that "the earth [should] become 
a scene of horror which even the lurid fancy 
of the Apocalypse would fail to portray," and 
adds, " if a sober scientific thinker is inclined 
to put little faith in the wild vaticinations of 
universal ruin which, in a less saintly person 
than the seer of Patmos, might seem to be dic- 
tated by the fury of a revengeful fanatic," etc. 

THE EARTH'S DESTRUCTION. 

There is nothing that refers to either sidereal 
or telluric ruin in the Apocalypse. In the 
various plausible interpretations of it, there is 
a general understanding that it is a picture of 
human history, prophetically, and has nothing 
to do with cosmical catastrophes, except it be 
in the sequel of a new heavens and new earth, 
a phrase apparently derived from Isaiah, and 
used by him in reference to a social and spirit- 
ual order of things — this consideration also 
favoring the figurative interpretation of II 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 133 

Peter ch. 3, adopted by some of the great men 
in orthodox ranks in all ages and rejected by 
others. There, in Peter's epistle, is the only 
seemingly literal prediction of the destruction 
of the earth, or at least by fire ; and, though 
that epistle is the only one that was particularly 
questioned in patristic times, and was queried 
even by Calvin and Luther, it is well to recollect 
(what no one appears to have noticed in this 
connection) that science has of late years made 
the frightful discovery that the spectrum of a 
number of comets agrees w T ith that of incandes- 
cent carbon ; and, if the substance be that, in 
that condition, and should mix with the earth's 
atmosphere, the result would precisely and 
literally fulfill the words of Peter, " the heavens 
being on fire shall be dissolved " (ouranoi, here 
the skies, the air). All would go in one grand 
conflagration. But such a catastrophe, flashing 
the vital oxygen of the air into deadly carbon 
dioxide, would leave the earth forever unin- 
habitable ; and this consideration and the 
whole chapter and Bible favor " the day of the 
Lord " and " his coming" as not referring to a 
material destruction and a personal reign on a 
renovated earth, but as figurative of great 
historical judgments only, and a social and 
religious renovation, according to Biblical 
usage. 



134 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



THE DAY OF THE LORD. 

The day of the Lord, distinctly in a moral 
and spiritual sense, we find in the last chapter 
of the Old Testament, where a literalist would 
certainty think that he finds a destruction by 
fire. " For behold, the day cometh, that shall 
burn as an oven ; and all the proud, yea, all 
that do wickedly, shall be stubble : and the 
day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the 
Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither 
root nor branch. But unto you that fear my 
name shall the sun of righteousness arise with 
healing in his wings ; and ye shall go forth, 
and grow up as calves of the stall. And ye 
shall tread down the wicked ; for they shall be 
ashes under the soles of your feet in the day 
that I shall do this, saith the Lord of Hosts. 
. . . Behold, I will send you Elijah the 
prophet before the coming of the great and 
dreadful day of the Lord : and he shall turn 
the heart of the fathers to the children," etc. 
The key of this is in the Gospels. " And Jesus 
answered and said unto them, Elias truly shall 
first come and restore all things. But I say 
unto you, that Eiias is come already, and they 
knew him not, but have done unto him whatso- 
ever they listed. . . . Then the disciples 
understood that he spake unto them of John 
the Baptist" (Matt. 17 : 11-13), who came 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION". 135 

" before him in the spirit and power of Elias, 
to turn the hearts of the fathers to the chil- 
dren, and the disobedient to the widsom of the 
just ; to make ready a people prepared for the 
Lord " (Luke 1 : 17). The great and dreadful 
day of the Lord, dreadful to the systems of 
wickedness, was the rising and power of the 
sun of righteousness, Christ, consuming evil in 
the earth while bringing healing and growth 
to those who are quickened by his light and 
warmth. 

THE COMING OF CHRIST AND THE NEW EARTH. 

As further preface to the last chapters of 
Revelation, which round out the great series 
of inspirations that began with the first chap- 
ter of Genesis, we may notice that Peter him- 
self on the day of Pentecost, said " this is that 
which was spoken of by- the prophet Joel," 
quoting the prophet's words which include " I 
will show wonders in heaven above, and signs 
in the earth beneath ; blood, and fire, and va- 
por of smoke ; the sun shall be turned into 
darkness, and the moon into blood, before that 
great and notable day of the Lord come" (Acts 
2 : 19-20) — the day of the Lord and preceding 
wonders agreeing with similar language used by 
our Savior, as marking " the Son of Man coming 
in the clouds of heaven with power and great 



136 



tzz a :-:>' : =i: : > : -?zi. 



glory/' " immediately after the tribulation of 
those days,*' the fall of Jerusalem and end of 
the Old Testament economy, when the Eoman 
eagles gathered together ; and this followed by 
the great separation under the Christian dis- 
pensation of the sheep from the goats, i; when 
the Son of Alan shall come in his glory and all 
his holy angels with him" (Matt. 24 and 25). 
And in Matt. 16, speaking of the coming of 
the Son of Man in the glory of the Father with 
his angels, he said, £; Verily I say unto you, 
there be some standing here which shall not 
taste of death, till they see the Son of Man 
coming in his kingdom." It was the utter fall 
of the old economy and the complete installa- 
tion of the new. The coming and the new 
heavens and earth are the new Christian order ; 
and whether any of the apostles and disciples, 
after that new order began to develop itself, 
were looking for a literal and speedy second 
Advent, and, if so, whether it was a permitted 
and salutary mistake in the first three trying 
centuries, as Gibbon thinks it was, is too ex- 
tensive a subject to enter upon here. Enough 
that the Eedeemer certainly did not fall into 
nor justify a "prodigious error" that Huxley 
conditionally ascribes to him in this regard. 
The catastrophic language of the apostles, as 
well as of their master, has been defended as a 
^:se veiling of all that bore relation to social 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 137 

and political changes — wise and even necessary 
in those times ; however this may be, it was 
the prophetic style of the Bible. 

THE CHRISTIAN ERA PREFIGURED. 

Good commentators have found striking 
correspondence between the sublime symbolical 
scenes of the Apocalypse and certain great 
events of history, especially as given in Gib- 
bon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" — 
an empire that in the apostle's day, as related 
to Christianity, was the most pressing subject 
for grand apocalyptic vision. But, whatever 
explanation may be given of the succession of 
seals, trumpets, and vials, and other imagery, 
the " new heaven and new earth " mast be in- 
terpreted in the light of Biblical usage of the 
phrase above mentioned. And the Divine 
prophetic inspiration of the Apocalypse — no 
matter who was the author of the book nor in 
what early century it was written — is con- 
firmed even in a single verse of a short chap- 
ter, the twentieth, preceding the new earth or 
order of things in the last two chapters. The 
seemingly far-fetched " Gog and Magog " 
could not have been brought in at random to 
represent any hostile power, and there is no 
apparent reason for bringing in here the sub- 
stance of Ezekiel's thirty-eighth and thirty- 



138 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



ninth chapters unless there was identity of the 
militant forces there named and described too 
clearly to be mistaken, including these two 
and other ethnic names. In fact, Gog and 
Magog are perfectly well known to phrase 
the ancient tribes north of the Caucasus and 
north and east of the Caspian, whose early 
inroads west and south culminated finally in 
the great irruption of Tartars and Turks, com- 
bined with other Mohammedans from every 
quarter, that reached and conquered Con- 
stantinople in 1453, and blotted out full half 
of Christendom, then extending around the 
Mediterranean. 

That particular date is not essential here, 
though it strikingly connects itself with the 
work and code of Theodosius II (died 450), 
which soon after his death finished the over- 
throw of Paganism in the Koman Empire, 
thus giving the 4£ thousand years" before the 
great new irruption of antichristian forces. 
Any particular stages of the overthrow and of 
the irruption can be selected, but the great 
two-fold fact remains. Indeed, Gibbon relates 
that the great Mohammedan onset was under- 
stood by Christians at the time as fulfilling 
this part of the Apocalypse. With acceptance 
of the revelator's own words in this chapter 
for a standing-place in interpretation, a studious 
inquirer can satisfy himself by a multitude of 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 139 

details in this and other prophecies, and in 
history, that this concluding book of the Bible 
stamps the final seal of Divine inspiration on 
its pages. 

The objector must explain away this pro- 
phetic vision that foresaw the earth's future, 
as well as the vision that in Genesis went back 
to the beginning': and it must be no sham 
refutation, like that of Huxley and others in 
respect to the Biblical account of creation, nor 
must it be only a sneer about " wild vaticina- 
tions" like a " revengeful fanatic's." It must 
show that the Apocalypse of Christianity is 
not, as it has been throughout shown to be by 
able students, a magnificent prefiguration of 
the greatest events and powers of the world, 
as related to the actual history of Christianity, 
especially its two great conflicts with anti- 
christian forces, down to the time when the 
holy city, the new Christian organization of the 
world, may be considered as having been estab- 
lished in its true glory forever on earth — an 
" everlasting kingdom," not doomed to fall as 
Huxley says of New Testament Christianity, 
still less by blows such as his, nor, on the 
other hand, transferable to the heavenly 
world, as some of our commentators would 
have it, thus perverting the last three chap- 
ters of the Bible to a miserable misapprehen- 
sion of the whole subject alike in the minds of 



140 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



believers and unbelievers.* In every verse of 
the three final chapters the scene is earth, to 
the end. 

Of course the glorious city, and all the 



* Archbishop Usher, Dr. John Lightfoot, and Francois 
Turretin are among those who were free from the 
modern perversions of Rev. 20. The prevailing error is 
failure to refer verse 2 directly to antichristian powers 
on earth, whatever supernatural influence may be un- 
derstood as implied ; and, in accordance with this, a 
failure to interpret verse 3 as meaning a restriction 
of such forces within bounds, beyond Christendom. 
Verse 4 admits of two interpretations, of which one is 
that which relates to the honor and influence in suc- 
ceeding ages of the martyrs of the first centuries ; and, 
on this view, verse 5 would relate to the revival and 
worship of pagan classicism. Especially is the very 
symbolic character of the Apocalypse overlooked in 
accepting two literal resurrections here, and far apart. 
The word in this place is manifestly figurative. In 
general, it is to be considered that the overthrow of the 
paganism of the then civilized world, and the temporary 
great inroad that threatened all Christendom sub- 
sequently, were fitly the great subjects of prophecy 
here, for the comfort and strengthening of the per- 
secuted then, and of Christians some centuries later. 
The last five verses may be construed as a figurative 
description of a great judgment ever going on, in- 
cluding the opening up of the records of the past, all 
judged more and more in the light of the now open 
Bible, " the book of life." As to the last two chapters, 
why wrest and wrench the Scripture by transferring 
them to heaven ? 



HUXLEY AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 141 

blessed scene in the last two chapters, are 
comparative— the terrible first centuries of 
struggle throwing the subsequent triumphs and 
blessings into dazzling light. There has been 
plenty of evil all along. The seer, if it had 
been within the scope of the visions, might 
have presented another loosing of another kind 
of Satan, for example, less than half a millen- 
nium after 1453 — not the irruption of Asiatic 
Gog and Magog on Christendom, but of a 
good part of Christendom on all heathendom 
(even on half-Christianized Madagascar), in 
seizures, outrages, wars, conquests, under the 
plea of establishing protectorates. But the 
holy city of righteousness and peace did not 
descend all at once ; John saw it " coming 
down," and it is ever coming and brightening, 
more and more. 

HUXLEYAN PRAISE OF CHRISTIANITY. 

The Huxleyan derision is mingled here and 
there with further praise of Christianity, as 
" that ideal of manhood, with its strength and 
its patience, its justice and its pity for human 
frailty, its helpfulness to the extremity of self- 
sacrifice, its ethical purity and nobility, which 
apostles have pictured [in books to be rejected 
as unauthentic?], in which armies of martyrs 
have placed their unshakable faith, and whence 



142 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



obscure men and women, like Catherine of Si- 
enna and John Knox, have derived the courage 
to rebuke popes and kings" [John Knox ob- 
scure ?] ; but in the same paragraph he says : 
" Critical science is remorselessly destroying 
the historical foundations of the noblest ideal 
of humanity which mankind have yet wor- 
shiped." Remorselessly, no doubt, but the de- 
stroying doubtful, if that is to be done by these 
and similar " scientific criticisms," beating like 
frothy waves against the Rock of Ages. 

Argumentation of all sorts will go on, but 
argumentation pro or con settles nothing for 
one who either never comes, or who once for 
all has come, into the full light of God and of 
God in Christ. Until then the religiously in- 
structed, as Huxley says he was, may be at 
best in uncertain twilight ; and, until then, the 
religiously self-consecrated may be in the 
shadow of Mount Sinai, ruled chiefly by con- 
science and yielding but a half-hearted service. 
Rut when one emerges fully into the light and 
liberty of the Gospel, the New Testament be- 
comes a new book, full of triumphant assurance 
and jubilant gladness and supernal beauty ; all 
is then clear forever, and all nature and the 
"Word shine with Divine glory inexpressible. 
Much the same consciousness of illumination, 
though it be a cold uncanny light, is true of 
many of those who are in the eclipse of faith, 



HUXLEY AKD CHRISTIAN TRADITION. 143 

as some of us know by our own past experi- 
ence — impressing one of the lessons of Christ, 
" Take heed that the light which is within 
thee be not darkness." And if one is looking 
about for a better than Christ's gospel, agnostic 
or other, and perhaps has followed for a time 
one or another of the famous false lights who 
have blazed out and nickered out successively 
even in our lifetime, he may find that the 
experiment or search gives new force to the 
words of Simon Peter — " Lord, to whom shall 
we go ? thou hast the words of eternal life." 
There is but one Gospel and one Christ, after 
all. 

On Huxley's tombstone is said to be inscribed 
the following lines, most fitly expressing his 
forlorn agnostic gospel, with an inconsistent 
and sentimental reference to the God of whom 
he professed to know nothing : 

M And if there be no meeting past the grave, 
If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest. 
Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep, 
For God still giveth his beloved sleep, 
And if an endless sleep he wills so best." 

That is all — the rest and sleep of nothing- 
ness ! — and granted by God to his beloved as 
perhaps the best thing for them — the beloved 
of Him including those who in denying the 
Son deny the Father also. Not so Christian- 



144 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



ity. " Belovedj now are we the sons of God, 
and it doth, not yet appear what we shall be, 
but we know that when he shall appear we 
shall be like him, for we shall see him as he 
is." " For if we believe that Jesus died and 
rose again, even so them also which sleep in 
Jesus will God bring with him." 



FALSE REVELATIONS OF THE UNSEEN. 145 



III. 

FALSE REVELATIONS OF THE 
UNSEEN. 

Huxley avers that religions, including the 
Christian, alike consist of information about a 
worldof spirits, with some ethical concomitants. 
Let us see. 

In everything the false exhibits its nature 
when placed beside the true, and the truth 
shines forth in the contrast. The triviality of 
spurious disclosures of the unseen world has 
been remarked ; the comparative silence of the 
Bible on the subject has been a matter of 
comment. But we may find untrodden ground, 
and a fresh argument for that inspired volume, 
by passing in rapid review some of the pseudo- 
revelations of various dates and both hemi- 
spheres. We shall find a singular family 
likeness in them ; and the features are not 
only triviality, luxurious imagery, more or less 
of Munchausen exaggeration, and in general 
an effort to humor curiosity by a display of 
overwise information, but also an assumption 
of much exact knowledge, even to the extreme 
of abundant and precise arithmetical statement, 



146 



THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL. 



For this article, the available sources are the 
Talmud (epitomized in Blackwood, 1832-33), 
the apocryphal gospels, and writings of Moham- 
med, Swedenborg, the Shakers, Mormons, and 
Spiritists. 

It will be shown that these teachings are in 
extreme contrast with the Holy Scriptures — 
as extreme as that of the Bible cosmogony with 
the fantastic myths of the creation that are 
found in other ancient records. How is it that 
this one book is so strange an exception ? 
How is it that the New Testament is a lofty 
exception to the writings, claiming high au- 
thority, that were composed in the same age, in 
the same region, even b}^ men of the same 
nation ? The truth is, uninspired man, assum- 
ing to put forth celestial revelations, can never, 
in any age, resist the temptation to tell all 
about heaven and hell, and make a vain show 
of the knowledge, Every such delusion or im- 
posture descends to the most trifling, if not 
absurd, details — is very particular in letting us 
know the place, number, size, and shape of the 
invisible worlds and their inhabitants, and is 
self-complacent in this display of minute infor- 
mation on so occult a subject. 

First, the rabbinical scriptures — a mass of 
traditions, mostly reduced to writing or collect- 
ed in the first three centuries of the Christian 
era, and claimed to be of more value than even 



FALSE REVELATIONS OF THE UNSEEN. 147 

the books of Moses. The traditions contain 
much that is wise, sublime, and beautiful, but 
much also that illustrates the vast difference 
between man's invention and God's word. 
They tell us, exactly, that there are seven 
heavens and seven hells. The heavens are each 
twelve times ten thousand miles square. The 
materials, furniture, and occupants of each are 
described ; for example, in the fifth heaven or 
house, where Elijah dwells, are couches of 
scarlet and blue, woven by Eve herself. ' At 
the gates of paradise stand sixty times ten 
thousand spirits ; they receive the soul of a 
righteous man ; they lead him to four springs 
of water, margined with eight hundred species 
of roses and myrrh ; and from these springs 
flow four rivers of milk, wine, honey, and 
balsam. In the first three hours of immortality, 
every righteous soul is an infant, and dwells in 
a celestial nursery ; in the next three hours, is 
a youth, and mingles with youthful pastimes; 
in the third watch, arrives at manhood. Among 
the wonders of paradise is the phoenix, a bird 
as large as a mountain and bright as the sun. 
Of the tree of life, it is said that its fruits have 
five hundred flavors. The Talmud is very wise, 
too, concerning good and evil angels. Every 
rabbi on earth is so infested with evil spirits 
that there are constantly a thousand on his 
right side, and ten times as many on his left. 



148 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



If a man is not cautious how he opens his eyes, 
there are some who will even be sure to get 
between the lids. Enough. The New Testa- 
ment, so far from dealing in such fables, warned 
Jew and Gentile against them. 

Of the apocryphal gospels, one of the least 
objectionable is that of Nicodemus, otherwise 
called the Acts of Pontius Pilate ; yet the un- 
known author, like every other writer of 
spurious revelations, cannot resist the tempta- 
tion to tell us much about the unseen world 
and its transactions. More than a quarter of 
the document, which is of the average length 
of the canonical Gospels, is given to an elabo- 
rate description of our Lord's descent into 
hades after his crucifixion. First, in the 
blackness of darkness there appeared the color 
of the sun, like gold, and a substantial purple- 
colored light. Then we are told what the 
spirits of Adam, Isaiah, Simeon, and John the 
Baptist said about the light. There is a long 
quarrel between Satan and the prince of hell 
concerning the expected arrival. Next, this 
prince is commanded to shut the gates of brass 
against the Lord ; the saints interfere ; con- 
fusion ensues ; the Lord bursts open the gates ; 
he tramples on death, terrifies the devils, gives 
the prince of hell dominion over Satan in 
exchange for that over saints, takes Adam by 
the hand, and, the rest joining hands, all as- 



FALSE REVELATIONS OP THE UNSEEN. 149 

cend to paradise. In one part of the account 
the particulars are given of the sojouru of 
Lazarus in hades, and how he escaped — a tale 
in striking contrast with the silence of the 
Gospels in respect to the experience of this 
Lazarus while dead. The Gospel of Nicoderaus 
sets forth nothing of this as a parable, like 
that of the other Lazarus, but as fact, as his- 
tory. It assures us that these transactions 
were copied from the record of two persons 
who rose from the dead, and that their ac- 
counts, written separately, agreed in every 
word and letter. The other pseudo-Gospels, 
which, unlike that named after Mcoderaus, 
descend to groveling puerilities, are largely 
taken up with the particulars of angelic ap- 
pearances. The religious literature of those 
centuries is as a tropical swamp of fancy or 
folly ; while far above it, in the very midst of 
it, soars the mountain-like word of God, solid 
and clear in its spiritual dignity, and solemn 
in its silence respecting the particulars of a 
future state. 

The Koran of Mohammed is marked by the 
same distinguishing spots of a spurious revela- 
tion of the unseen. It panders to curiosity 
and runs into trivial minutiae and numerical 
statements. It describes the gardens of para- 
dise, the couches with linings of thick silk, in- 
terwoven with gold, the green cushions, and 



150 THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 

beautiful carpets. Every believer will feast 
from three hundred dishes of gold and will 
have eighty thousand servants. Spirits, genii, 
angels, are portrayed as distinctly as Agassiz 
delineated the tribes of fishes and polyps. 
The tree of happiness in paradise bears what- 
ever one may wish : horses, ready saddled and 
bridled, and garments will burst forth from its 
fruits, if desired. If our Holy Scriptures had 
been written by other persons than Oriental, it 
Would still be a wonder that they are at the 
furthest pole from all this tissue of nonsense. 
But, when we consider that the fiery and 
fanciful Asiatic mind, so soon as it turns to in- 
visible things, flies off into a blaze of extrava- 
gances as certainly as a rocket, it is amazing 
that the Bible is what it is, unless it was in- 
spired and superintended by the Divine Spirit. 

The curiously statistical turn of false revela- 
tions might be illustrated here by a document 
printed at Rome, by "superior permission," 
but not now at hand for quotation. It as- 
sumes to be an answer from Christ himself to 
a pra}^er ; and it tells the precise number of 
drops that fell from beneath the crown of 
thorns, and the number of sighs and groans 
that were breathed out on the cross. But we 
pass to more modern disclosures of the unseen. 

Swedenborg, in his "Heaven and Hell," 
deals with the invisible, He informs us that 



FALSE KEVELATIONS OF THE UNSEEN - . 151 

there are three heavens, and how they are 
constructed; also, what class of persons dwell 
in each quarter — north, east, west, and south. 
The angels dwell in houses like ours on earth, 
but more beautiful; there are parlors and 
chambers in great numbers ; there are courts, 
gardens, and shrubberies. Palaces there are, 
with gardens, on the " south side," glittering 
with silver leaves. The most intelligent of 
the angels have garments as of flame or light ; 
the less intelligent have white robes without 
splendor; those still less so are dressed in 
divers colors. Swedenbor^ had seen moun- 
tains in the other world taken possession of by 
evil spirits, but shaken and overturned by the 
mere look and will of an angel ; he had seen a 
hundred thousand of the evil dispersed and 
cast into hell by the same means. The great- 
est power resides in those angels who constitute 
the arms of Heaven, for all Heaven is in the 
form of a man, and every single part of it is in 
that form. Such are samples of the informa- 
tion given. 

Of the more local and limited forms of 
pseudo-revelation, that of Shakerism may be 
taken as a specimen. One of its followers, 
F. W. Evans, gave a " Compendium " of it 
some years since. From this it appears that 
there are four heavens and hells, divided 
among antediluvians, Jews, Christians — the 



152 THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 

fourth, however, being now in preparation. 
Mother Ann Lee, under whose teachings the 
system took its present shape, was favored 
with revelations : she looked into the windows 
of heaven and saw the angels ; she saw Ezekiel 
Goodrich flying from one heaven to another ; 
she saw Jane in the world of spirits, praising 
God in the dance ; she saw Jonathan Wood 
among the dead, and he was like claps of 
thunder among them, waking them up ; and 
she heard Ezekiel Goodrich's voice roar from 
one prison to another, preaching to the dead. 

The Mormons profess to be materialists and 
adventists ; they mostly confine their ideas to 
earth as enjoyed both now and in the future. 
In view of this it is the more remarkable that, 
in the little their prophets say concerning in- 
visible things, there are the inevitable spots of 
spurious disclosure ; there is a disposition to be 
very wise and statistical in respect to the un- 
seen. Joseph Smith declared that he had seen 
heaven and hell. One of his apostles gives the 
names of ten demons, such as " Kite, Kilo, 
Kelo," etc. ; some of these are presidents over 
seventies in hell, and have six counselors 
each. This person claims to have cast out just 
three hundred and nineteen demons on one 
occasion from one individual.* The Mormons 



*The Mormons, or Latter-Day Saints. London, 1853. 



FALSE EEVELATIONS OF THE UKSEEK. 153 



make it a reproach, rather than a merit, of or- 
dinary Christian faith that it is Dot over-wise 
as to heaven. One of their hymns has these 
lines : 

" The heaven of sectarians is not the heaven for me, 
So doubtful its location, neither on land nor sea." 

Modern Spiritism, with all its affectation of 
high-sounding philosophy, has the precise char- 
acteristics of all the delusions now mentioned — > 
the same vainglorious conceit of occult knowl- 
edge, and the same frivolous particularity of 
statement. Like the rabbin and the Moham- 
medan, the Spiritist believes in seven heavens. 
And as the rabbin informs us that the houses 
of heaven are twelve times ten thousand miles 
square, and the Mohammedan teaches that 
every believer will have a farm a thousand 
days' journey in extent, so Andrew Jackson 
Davis, in his " Present Age," tells us to multi- 
ply our earth by twenty-seven million times its 
present size, and it will give you the exact 
extent of one of the countless parks of the 
second sphere. He locates the second sphere 
as encircling the Milky "Way, and describes its 
mountains, shrubbery, and ten thousand varie- 
ties of flowers. Each hemisphere of this sphere 
is divided into six different societies, In the 
first are negroes, Indians, idiots, and criminals ; 



154 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



and, strange to say, on another page it appears 
that this is the heaven also of an immense 
number of infants.* Davis once saw a con- 
gress of thousands of spirits seated " thirty 
miles " up in the air, " a little east of Boston." 
In the Mohammedan heaven there is a tree 
that bears horses, ready saddled and bridled ; 
in the Spiritist heaven, according to a pub- 
lished communication from the other world, a 
young lady has her piano, and rides out every 
day on a pony. 

Every careful and candid reader of the Bible 
must feel that, in the respects mentioned in this 
article, that book is as far from these follies as 
the east is from the west, as heaven is from 
earth. How simple and spiritual, how dignified 
and divine, how high and holy, does it shine 
forth in the contrast ! How is it that it is so 
singular an exception, under the great univer- 
sal temptation to give loose rein to fancy and 
vainglory in speaking of invisible things ? 

Before coming to the New Testament, which 
exhibits this contrast in the strongest light, 
brief reference may be made to the Old Testa- 
ment. The careless reader may mistake some 
of its passages as comparable with the false 
revelations. It will be found, however, that 
they all are visions on the earth, not of 
heaven, and are manifestly symbolic — not given 

* Cf. jpp. 215, 218 (ed. 1853). 



FALSE KEVELATIONS OF THE UNSEED. 155 

as literal, eternal realities. They do not 
assume to remove the veil between us and the 
celestial, but rather are embroiderings of the 
veil. Such are the visions at the ascent of 
Elijah and to the servant of Elisha, and the 
highly figurative visions of Isaiah, Ezekiel, 
Daniel, and Zechariah. The appearances of 
angels, likewise, are on the earth, not an un- 
folding of the scenes of another world. 

The same is true of everything that may be 
adduced for comparison from the New Testa- 
ment, except it be the simple affirmation that 
the first martyr, looking steadfastly into 
heaven, saw the glory of God and Jesus stand- 
ing on the right hand of God ; and the brief 
assurance that there are " many mansions," the 
meaning of which is not explained, and, no less 
enigmatic, that there is a " spiritual body." 
The Eevelation of John, from which enthusi- 
asts and impostors have doubtless drawn some 
of their coloring, is no exception. It was a 
revelation of events to come to pass on earth ; 
it is not a revelation of the next life. The very 
verse which speaks of a door opened in heaven 
explains what follows as things which must 
be hereafter ; it introduces a series of symbols 
too bold, too earthly, to have been intended 
for heaven itself, and all are connected with a 
series of crises on earth. Moreover, here and 
there, the heaven spoken of — a wonder in 



156 



THE AGH0ST1C GOSPEL* 



heaven, a sign in heaven, and the like— evi* 
dently locates the visions as beheld in the 
visible heavens, not the invisible and spiritual. 
And when we come to the new Jerusalem, 
which, like other parts of this book of John, 
has by mere accommodation furnished much 
of the celestial imagery used by Christians, and 
perhaps, in its enumerations and measurements, 
suggested by perversion the arithmetical vaga- 
ries of fanatics who assume to describe heaven, 
we find that it is not heaven, but a city — a new 
order of things— descending to earth, to be 
realized on earth ; " and they shall bring the 
glory and honor of the nations into it," as 
already has largely come to pass. In fine, in 
the words of the last chapter,. " The Lord God 
of the holy prophets sent his angel to show 
unto his servants the things which must shortly 
be done." This was the purpose. 

The true position of the New Testament on 
this subject cannot better be illustrated than in 
II Cor. 12 : 2-5, and the context. Here, in brief 
space, are no less than eight marks of the 
great modesty and moderation of the sacred 
writers when speaking in sober prose of the 
hidden things of the future world. First, Paul 
had apparently kept secret during fourteen 
years the fact of a wonderful trance, granted, 
no doubt, to strengthen him for his extraor- 
dinary trials. Secondly, he now speaks of it 



FALSE REVELATIONS OF THE UNSEEtf. 157 

only because forced to assert his claims as 
superior to those of certain false apostles. 
Thirdly, he avoids the use of the word " I," 
only saying, "I knew a man" who had the 
vision. Fourthly, he assumes no undue knowl- 
edge, but repeats the disclaimer, " whether in 
the body or out of the body, I know not ; God 
knoweth." Fifthly, he reveals absolutely 
nothing of what he saw ; in the expression 
" third heaven," he probably spoke only after 
the manner of the Jews, to whom the first 
heaven was the cloud region, the second the 
starry, the third the unseen world. Sixthly, 
so far from disclosing anything, he declares 
that what he learned is " unspeakable " — " not 
lawful for man to utter." Seventhly, he ac- 
knowledges a sore affliction, imposed lest he 
should be vain of the heavenly trance, thus 
teaching that God does not regard such rare 
revelations as things to be boastingly trumpeted 
abroad. Eighthly, he expressly says that, while 
he might make much of the trance if it were 
another man's, "yet of myself I will not glory, 
but in my infirmities." 

Elsewhere the apostle Paul writes: "Now we 
see through a glass, darkly ; but then face to 
face : now I know in part ; but then shall I 
know even as also I am known." And similarly 
writes the apostle John, the author of the book 
of Eevelation itself : " Now are we the sons of 



THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL. 



God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall 
be ; but we know that when he shall appear, 
we shall be like him." 

"Why is the Bible so silent in respect to the 
physical aspects and the affairs of heaven ? 
First, it may be because heaven does not essen- 
tially consist of outward glories ; its foretastes 
here are not of palaces and gardens, but in 
moral and spiritual experiences. Secondly, it 
may be because much of the reality of heaven 
is unspeakable, transcending our words and 
ideas, as Paul intimates. Thirdly, if an}^thing 
could be communicated to us, it may be with- 
held because description, in our human lan- 
guage, would belittle and render trite, whereas 
the slight hints of the Bible suggest untold 
glory. Fourthly, a fuller revelation of heaven 
might distract our thoughts from practical 
duty, and turn our attention from the great 
moral truths of existence, the substance of 
heaven and hell — above all, from the Lord 
Jesus Christ as the great object of wonder, 
hope, and desire. Any revelation that occu- 
pies itself with the number, size, shape, loca- 
tion, scenery, and transactions of the unseen 
worlds — with else than him who is the All in 
All — is evidently not of God. All these spuri- 
ous visions bring a hundred vain and childish 
things between us' and God. They are busy 
with the "spirits and the splendors, the palace, 



FALSE REVELATIONS OF THE UNSEEK. 150 



gilding, and thousands of liveried servants," 
forgetting the King who is within, all-glori- 
ous— not seeking to find him and come even to 
his seat. 

" Let no man beguile you of your reward in 
a voluntary humility and worshiping of angels, 
intruding into those things which he hath not 
seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, and 
not holding the Head,*' namely, Christ. And 
let no one beguile us with the idea that a book 
so unlike all pretended revelations in every 
age and land, so reticent, lofty, and spiritual, 
while they are so like each other in folly, is 
not more than human— is not divine. 



j 

5 



160 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



IV. 

ARGUMENTS FOR THE UNSEEN. 

In all the agnostic talk of a lack of evidence 
of an unseen spiritual world, as the only argu- 
ment against it, it is plain enough that the 
seeming remoteness of such a world from hard 
matter-of-fact scientific pursuits, and from our 
daily humdrum life, is a background of the 
unbelief. It needs, therefore, to be brought 
near in the ligh t of facts. 3 

The Bible, unlike many pretended revela- 
tions, confines itself to the moral facts of the 
unseen world ; as to other facts, it discloses 
hardly anything except that there is a spiritual 
body. It often implies, however, that the in- 
habitants of that world were in ready commu- 
nication with earth, especially in the early 
stages of divine revelation, and, later, in con- 
nection with the appearing and work of Christ ; 
and this implication favors an inference that 
we are surrounded by an invisible world. 

The present purpose is to state and illustrate 
anew and briefly some arguments for such a 
scene of existence, in the light of compara- 
tively recent facts, experiments, and calcula- 



ARGUMENTS FOR THE UNSEEN. 161 

tions. At first glance, how strange, in the 
midst of our commonplace life, seem the 
wonderful appearances at the birth, transfigu- 
ration, and resurrection of our Lord ! How 
strange, in the cold light of modern science, 
and under the stony eye of materialism ! But 
what if the celestial incidents comport with 
some current and familiar facts of life and 
death, and with an increasing tendency of 
science itself to make everything of the invis- 
ible, nothing of the visible? 

Without touching on the many debatable 
phenomena that come under the discussion of 
the old psychology and the new so-called 
psychical research, and without giving any 
credence to the claims of modern spiritism, we 
may first consider a class of facts that are too 
much slighted, though known directly or indi- 
rectly to almost every person. It is that, by 
no means rarely, the dying seem to behold the 
beings and glories of another world. The last 
utterance of the poet Wordsworth was: "Is 
that my dear Dora ?" — a daughter deceased, 
whom he saw as it were with open eyes. If 
such occurrences were uncommon, or were 
always associated with some evidence of delir- 
ium, they might be passed over; but they are 
not very infrequent, and are known to take 
place in w T hat appears to be a condition of calm 
rationality, in some ? if not all, cases 5 and the 



162 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



delirium of disease should evolve distorted 
phantasms rather than clear recognition of 
departed friends or sweet visions of heaven. 
If the cases were only those of mature age, we 
might suppose that the fading sense and wan- 
dering fantasy mistake for realities that which 
had been a matter of life-long thought or faith. 
But many young children, whose dying words 
or gestures must be regarded as called forth 
by no visual projections of their daily childish 
thoughts (which do not run in such channels), 
have, in seeming tranquil sanity and repose, 
beheld something like the heavens opened ; 
pointing thither and uttering exclamations of 
delight, even describing objects that were ap- 
parently bej T ond their infantile range of 
imagination or foreign to it. And why should 
their visions, particularly, be so beautiful, 
when, in ordinary disturbed sleep and in sick- 
ness, their minds more often conjure up things 
frightful ? Instead of referring these facts to 
a disordered or stagnant brain, we may fairly 
suppose that lethargy explains why the major- ; 
ity of the dying do not see the heavens opened 1 
until the soul is quite released. One may be 
averse to credulity and yet give due weight to 
the class of facts now under consideration.* 
We have the further fact that, in life and 

*Dr. Edward H. Clark (died 1877, medical professor 
in Harvard University, and in his day the most eminent 



ARGUMENTS FOE THE UNSEEN". 163 



health, we are dealing with none but invisible 
beings. The materialist himself must acknowl- 
edge that the unknown quantity which consti- 
tutes personality, amid all the change and 
degradation of bodily tissue, is beyond dissec- 
tion, is viewless, and that some organizing 
force beyond his ken precedes and accompanies 
organism. He sees not his fellow-man, but 
only an outward manifestation of an unknown 
force, be that force vital or chemical, or other. 
He who believes in a personal God acknowl- 
edges that there is, at least, one unseen being 
near us — one glorious inhabitant of an unseen 
world ; and he who believes that man is made 

physician in Boston), in his book on " Visions," thinks 
that the visions of the dying can be explained physiolog- 
ically; yet he says, "who will dare to say absolutely all ?" 
He quotes two instances from Frances Power Cobbe's 
then recent article, "The Kiddle of Death," and says 
that " it is difficult to give an adequate physiological 
solution;" one was that of a child intelligent to the last. 
From his own observation he gives a case where there 
was "no stupor, delirium, strangeness or moribund 
symptom indicating cerebral disturbance " — the patient 
dying suddenly of heart disease, up to nearly that mo- 
ment conversing as pleasantly and intelligently as ever, 
and then unexpectedly revealing the vision by glowing 
features and delighted exclamation. In another part of 
the volume he speaks of the natural visions of childhood 
in life as unpleasant, thus confirming the above re- 
marks about the great contrast between these and those 
of dying children. 



164 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



in the image of God, accepting our spiritual 
nature, realizes that every human assembly is 
an assembly of spirits unseen. To him an 
invisible universe of beings is no far-fetched 
idea, foreign and uncongenial to his daily sur- 
roundings. 

Besides, it is no new truth that there is much 
everywhere, before the eyes or other senses of 
men, of the existence of which they are and 
continue through life to be unconscious. But 
we may find fresh illustration everywhere ; for 
example, in the contrast of man with other 
animals, or race with race. The lower animals 
perceive their friends, foes, or prey in ways 
impossible to the human senses. Some of 
them manifestly live in and are guided by a 
world of odors, unknown and well-nigh incon- 
ceivable to man ; such is the solution that has 
been offered of the well-known instances when 
domestic carnivora have found their way over 
long distances where they certainly were not 
retracing impressions of sight. Tribes of men 
distinguish objects beyond the range of our 
civilized senses. 

The limited nature of the human senses, 
whereby we may fail to perceive an all-pervading 
"second universe," has been greatly emphasized 
by the progress of science, since Isaac Taylor 
reasoned from it in his " Physical Theory of 
Another Life 3 " half a century ago. Improve- 



ARGUMENTS FOR THE UHSEEtf. 165 

ments in spectroscopy and photography show 
that invisible rays extend as far beyond the 
violet end of the spectrum as the length of the 
spectrum itself, and, indeed, must continue un- 
til the vibrations " become infinitely rapid and 
infinitely small." Some of these ultra rays 
can be made visible by interposing a substance 
that lessens their refrangibility. Professor 
Stokes, the English physicist, found that when 
a tube, rilled with a solution of quinine sul- 
phate, was moved along the spectrum, "on 
arriving nearly at the violet extremity, a 
ghost-like gleam of pale blue light shot across 
the tube; . . . it did not cease to appear 
until the tube had been moved far beyond the 
violet extremity of the spectrum visible on the 
screen." The wave-lengths of the spectrum 
sun-rays have been measured, and we perceive 
only those that are from about one-forty- to 
one-sixty-thousandth of an inch ; to all others 
we are blind. So of sound ; the human ear, 
practically, hears only those sounds that come 
from forty to four thousand vibrations of the 
air per second, though the possible limit has 
been traced from sixteen to near forty thou- 
sand or more. The microphone reveals a new 
range of notes, and it is conceivable that this 
instrument, in connection with sympathetic 
and harmonic vibrations, may bring down to 
audibility still higher sources of sound. It is 



1G6 



THE AGKOSTIC GOSPEL. 



not affirmable that any construction of mortal 
eye and ear could disclose the supernal; but it 
is certain that there is very much that is be- 
yond the reach of our senses — an infinity of 
unknown vibrations around us. And the facts 
suggest that a great exaltation of senses, such 
as occurs in certain morbid conditions of the 
body, may sometimes bring to sight or hearing 
not phantasms, but realities, never perceived 
in our ordinary life. 

Comparatively recent experiments on the 
senses offer another argument. Helmholtz, 
Weber, and others, by ingeniously devised tests, 
have proved that the larger part of our percep- 
tions, such as those of the relief, size, distance, 
and direction of objects, are not intuitive nor 
direct, but acquired by inference, by years of 
comparison of the testimony of the different 
senses, especially in early life. Some of the 
lower animals, indeed, inherit much of this ex- 
perience, as the phrase is ; the chick picks up 
its food on its first day, as if with some knowl- 
edge of quality, direction, and distance, and 
certainly with some well-ordered muscular 
action ; but its action is not so much intellectual 
and free as it is that inherited co-ordination of 
sensation with reflex nervous impulse, on which 
the life of the creature depends, and which is 
of the same sort with the seeking of the mater- 
nal fount by the human infant. The child 



AKGUMESTTS FOE THE UHSEEK. 167 

must for the most part learn by trial, com- 
parison, judgment, because it is intellectual, 
free, progressive, not an automaton of instinct. 
Since, therefore, we know scarcely anything 
directly, our seeming direct knowledge of the 
outward world, and our seeming lack of such 
knowledge in regard to any spiritual world 
above it, are illusive. All our knowledge, save 
a few " necessary ideas," is inferential. It is 
no subject of just reproach that we believe in 
the unseen and eternal by the same mental 
process ; and assuredly there is enough in the 
material and moral world to justify our high 
faith, our spiritual vision, however indirect the 
evidence may be. 

The new researches, above mentioned, reflect 
back much light on the old fact that the blind, 
when restored to sight, have to familiarize 
themselves anew with objects previously well 
known by touch ; at first, for example, mis- 
taking one animal for another species: also, 
that Caspar Hauser, when first fronting a 
window, saw the exterior landscape only as an 
unmeaning splash of colors on the glass. All 
our presentative knowledge is thus but a slow 
interpretation of hints, signs, hieroglyphics, 
scattered and illegible in themselves, separately 
considered. "We do not look out upon the 
world and see it as it is, until after long col- 
location and elaboration of the hints it gives. 



168 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



us, though, in maturer life, it appears to stand 
forth to our eyes in its proper shapes, distances, 
and expansion, It is a projected phantom, 
whatever may be its physical basis. Heaven, 
too, has its abundant hints, not less ascertain- 
able and interpretable. 

Men of science, least of all, should shrug 
their shoulders at mention of the unseen. The 
truth is, in this matter, they linger among the 
notions of the common crowd, to whom 
nothing exists where nothing can be touched ; 
or they inconsistently give way to an impres- 
sion that nothing exists that cannot be weighed, 
measured, dissected. In their own way they 
deal more with the hidden, the invisible, the 
vanished, or the future, than with the tangible. 
They are given to theory, and great in hy- 
pothesis, which word is but the Greek for the 
Latin-derived word supposition. Huxley pro- 
nounced the fossil horse-like animals of our 
western Tertiary — first, four-toed, then three, 
then with but one toe usable — his long-looked- 
for, final, and positive demonstration of the 
theory of evolution. It is certainly a good 
argument, and, in the absence of other con- 
trary facts, strengthens a general and reason- 
able evolution "faith ;" but it directly concerns 
the subject of horses, and no more absolutely 
demonstrates even their derivation than the 
rinding of a variety of vehicles at different 



ARGUMENTS FOR THE UNSEEN. 109 



depths in the ooze of the Missouri would 
demonstrate that a one-wheeled barrow was 
derived from a bicycle, this from a tricycle? 
and the tricycle from a four-wheeled "prairie 
schooner." As inferential, the equine argu- 
ment may be accepted, so far as it goes ; and 
inferential faith, founded on data and fair 
reasoning, stands good for both worlds, present 
and future, this being the point now made. 
Tyndall not only adopts the theory of an 
ether filling all space, but describes its qualities, 
and, indeed, concludes that it acts less like a 
gas or other fluid than a jelly — a universal 
jelly ; so that we have, by inference, that much 
of something like solidity filling space. So 
with the astronomers ; whether or not they see 
the heavens of St. Stephen opening, they 
believe, or did believe, that the starry heavens 
are slightly opening to the north, and, as a 
reasonable explanation of this, that our whole 
solar system is moving in that direction. In 
everything science reasons from the known, 
however slight, to the vast unknown ; theoret- 
ical geology and chemistry are largely founded 
on this method ; and this is essentially the 
kind of reasoning that establishes our belief in 
the invisible and spiritual. 

But, what is matter, that seems so solid and 
certain, while the spiritual impresses us as 
shadowy and unreal ? The jocular answer be- 



170 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL* 



comes more and more the sober one — "no 
matter," The materialists (and they are now- 
metaphysical, aiming, as the word signifies, at 
something beyond physics) of late years would 
have us assume something quite unknown, of 
which so-called matter and mind are but the 
two faces. Isaac Taylor, long ago, following 
Boscovich's physical theory, reasoned that all 
we know of any outward world is motion — 
some motion in the organs of sense ; and we 
might add that all we know of these organs 
themselves is the same. John Stuart Mill, who 
confined our knowledge to phenomena (that 
which appears), found his only probability of 
an outward world in the recurrence of the 
same series of mental images as he supposably 
walked the same supposable street. As to any 
material atoms, their existence was at first and 
is still but a convenient hypothesis, as we all 
are aware ; and leading men of science now 
declare that we know nothing but force, and 
that science has become the study of that, But 
we do not know what force is in itself. 

However, w 7 e are not now concerned with 
such questions except that, in every point of 
view possible, the great unseen, for which we 
have intimations and reasons, is as real as the 
seen, or more so. Enough that we know not 
the visible in itself, but only by some message 
it sends to us from afar ; truly so, when it 



ARGUMENTS FOR THE UHSEEK. 171 



seems nearest. This page of print, distant ten 
inches from the eye, is at the distance of five 
hundred thousand wave-lengths of light, a wide 
sea of ether, across which those mysterious 
waves must flow to us, like the inflowings of 
subtile influence from another world. In truth, 
whatever there may be exteriorly, there is no 
light, no color, as we apprehend these, outside 
of the mind. Let the vibrations cease, and 
everything vanishes ; let molecules cease to 
give forth resistant force, and nothing is tangi- 
ble. Since, therefore, the physical world is so 
tremulous, shadowy, spiritual, it is no presump- 
tion against a hidden universe that it affects 
us as something dreamy and unsubstantial. 
Granting that matter is composed of atoms, 
still there is nothing solid, except to our sen- 
sation. An eminent English mathematician 
has calculated that, in a piece of dense metal, 
the atoms must be as far apart as a hundred 
men would be when distributed at equal dis- 
i tances from each other over the surface of 
England ; that is, one to every five hundred 
square miles.* Surely, no supramundane world 
can be much more at variance than that with 
all that we deem firm and substantial. 

* Noted in a memorandum book (since lost or de- 
stroyed), and, if memory is not at fault, taken from a 
scientific periodical. It is not in the calculations of 
Sir William Thompson in Nature, Vol. I. 



172 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



The visible is, at all events, transient ; so 
that, if there be anything permanent, it must 
be invisible, and must be spiritual in some sense 
of the word that we need not, on this subject, 
attempt to define. Men come and go, laws 
are made and unmade, constitutions are 
changed, buildings crumble, but the invisible 
state or church endures. The Roman power 
existed twelve hundred years, and, in another 
form, still exists; but everything perceptible 
by the senses has so changed continually that 
the Eternal City of to-day is built upon twenty- 
five feet depth of its own accumulated ruins. 
The permanent, the eternal, are no idle words, 
and represent that which is in its nature im- 
perceptible to our daily vision. 

Our chief difficulty removed, namely, the 
sensuous prejudice against the unseen, we only 
need to recur briefly to the high probabilities 
in favor of its existence as an all-present reality. 
Man's immortality, in connection with the 
general order of nature, looks to a higher, 
wider, more universal stage of being than this ; 
and, not to repeat the many natural and moral 
arguments for his immortality, it may be noted 
that occasionally a new fact in that direction, 
of a physiological sort least to be expected, is 
brought out ; as, for example, in the observa- 
tions of Brown-Sequard on certain cholera pa- 
tients, whose minds remained clear and active 



ARGUMENTS FOR THE TOSEEtf. 173 



when their blood was becoming black and 
clotted in the last stages of the disease ; a fact 
inconsistent with the identity of mind and 
brain, since the latter depends on the blood for 
its activity. 

Our longings to know the universe, and our 
beginnings in this knowledge, prophesy a free 
range through space. Still more, the full dis- 
closure of the divine system and plans, as 
everywhere exhibited, is needed to explain dif- 
ficulties and to complete our knowledge of the 
great Creator and Kuler, and this could be at- 
tained only in a state of existence admitting 
such free range. 

Of late years, fresh illustration of the fact 
that life superabounds is made conspicuous, 
suggesting that there is no vast reach of space 
around us devoid of being, but rather a populous 
infinitude. So true is it that creation is crowded, 
within the limits of human observation, the 
phrase, u struggle for existence," has become 
familiar and famous. Darwin found, on a square 
yard of soil, thirty-two little trees battling for 
room ; on another square yard he counted three 
hundred and fifty-seven sprouting w r eeds of 
twenty different species. Every element and 
every possible habitat has its forms of life ; 
why not the field of space, occupied as it is by 
at least one substance, as science asserts ? Is 
all sentient being confined to a few starry 



174 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



needle-points, while the rest is a desert, a void 
abyss, vacant of all interest ? 

Here comes in the thought of the author of 
the "Physical Theory," already spoken of. All 
that we see of the Father's house and its many 
mansions, the far-scattered stars, is essentially 
alike, on the low plane of sensible matter. Is 
there no upward glorious superstructure ? And 
he adds that analogy also demands a destiny 
of boundless splendors and activities for those 
who begin their career on so vast a material 
platform. Here, too, comes in the thought of 
the poet Young, adopted by Dana and other 
students of nature : we trace a long-ascending 
series of life, reaching up to man, who is the 
first of a new series, the spiritual. Our new 
capacities proclaim an all-pervading, towering 
system as their destiny and counterpart and 
consummation. 

Thoughts coincident with those of Isaac 
Taylor have been credited to him in the fore- 
going remarks ; and, besides these, in the line 
of the hypothesis now considered, he reasons 
from the less dense and the imponderable sub- 
stances that pervade all nature ; from the 
range of creative work, as we know it, up and 
down between the infinitely great and the in- 
finitely minute, and the boundless variety of 
that work ; and, among other original sugges- 
tions, he gives his theory of the connection of 



ARGUMENTS FOR THE UtfSEEH. 175 



mind with body as favoring the immediate 
experience of another state of life at death, one 
distant neither in space nor time. 

The other remarkable book on this subject, 
entitled " The Unseen Universe," by two emi- 
nent men of science, Professor Balfour Stewart 
of England and Professor Tait of Scotland, is 
still fresh in the memory of many. They argue 
from the law of continuity and the apparent 
fact of the dissipation of energy from its centers 
into space, that the forces of nature must reap- 
pear in a higher, more spiritual universe, from 
which all visible things began, and in which 
they must lose themselves again. From the 
limited period of the universe, they infer a 
higher everlasting system as consonant with an 
eternal, infinite God. They also appeal to the 
intuition of immortality, and apply the law of 
continuity to man's continued existence beyond 
the visible. 

Such is a sketch, not of the grand argument, 
which in all its yet unwritten fullness and com- 
pleteness might employ a life, but of many of 
the considerations involved, old or new, or 
newly illustrated. The Christian believer, for 
himself, is of course satisfied with the brief 
hints in the Holy Scriptures. But of the 
doubter he may well ask if, in all the sublimity 
of a loftier, broader, endless life, of heavens 
opened to dying martyrs and dying children, 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



gleaming through the sacred histories, shining 
out in the dreams of poets, standing forth in 
the reasonings of philosophers, and accordant 
with the aspirations of sad, weary, Godlike 
humanity — if, in all this, man has outrun nature 
and overtopped the power of God himself? 
Has it not proved true that nature and God, 
as we come to know them better, far surpass 
our extremest reasonings and imaginations % 
The more we learn of nature, the more we find 
it full of hidden wonders and inexhaustible in- 
finitudes. The more Ave learn of life, here on 
earth, the more does it open into bright heavens 
and yawn with dark abysses. If we are sure 
of anything, it is that every step leads on, still 
on, and up or down, to something beyond ; 
and that if anything is temporal it is the seen, 
if anything is eternal it is the unseen. 



A UNIVERSE m LITTLE — A DEE AM. 177 



V. 

A UNIVERSE IN LITTLE-A DREAM. 

I had been reading that sublimest of unin- 
spired prose-poems, Richter's " Dream of the 
Universe," and, as I reclined upon the dewy 
grass on a clear summer night, was thinking 
that the immensities he pictures are after all 
but comparative to ourselves and our sparrow 
eyes and sparrow wings. If so, why should 
that which seems to us interminable vastness 
disturb our faith in creation, Creator, and 
Redeemer ? Extension and succession may be 
necessities of thought, to doubt which would 
be to doubt everything, yet they may be but 
modes of finite apprehension. In fine, what 
have size, distance, and duration to do with 
any religious problem ? What spiritual verity 
is to be determined by foot-rule or clock, by 
leagues or centuries ? To God there is noth- 
ing great and nothing small. 

While so thinking, I saw a seeming star 
shoot down from the zenith ; as it neared the 
earth it expanded into the bright form of an 
angel, bearing a staff like a thread of light- 
ning. The figure paused near me and breathed 



IT8 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL, 



the words : ""Wouldst thou learn the brevity of 
earthly life, and what the world thou seest 
may be to the world unseen ?" Thinking that 
I also should be blessed with the two wings 
Here and Yonder, and fly through immensity, 
I gladly gave assent. The figure touched me 
with the lightning staff ; but no ^angelic 
strength flowed into me ; no rainbow wings 
unfurled their ample breadth, but a sinking, 
melting sensation crept over me ; I shrank 
rapidly, until I was diminished to an atom — 
so small that, in grasping for support at a 
particle of dust floating by, I fell headlong 
through a large tunnel-like pore in its very 
center. As the point of space into which I 
was compressed was at first just where the 
center of my former body had been, of course 
I was a few inches from the ground ; down 
this dizzy height I continued to fall, until, just 
before I reached the earth, I became fright- 
fully aware that I was about to be precipitated 
directly into a dew-drop ! I drew in my breath, 
determining manfully to abide the terrific 
plunge, and swim for my life, although, as I 
descended an inch nearer, the drop expanded 
into a wide, shoreless ocean, as it were a whole 
round world of water. Alas ! thought I, this is 
the penalty of my presumptuous curiosity. I 
endeavored to calm the wild tumult of my 
thoughts, that I might die with composure. 



A UNIVERSE IN LITTLE — A DREAM. 179 

when, as I approached yet nearer in my quick 
descent, the dew-drop seemed no longer a sea, 
but apparently separated into a cloud of mist 
— then its particles widened still further, until 
they lay at seemingly immeasurable distances 
from each other, and glittered in the moon- 
light like little stars. I descended between 
them as into a wide, glorious universe of scat- 
tered suns ! 

i I had a cold bath after all ; for, passing to the 
very center of the stellar dew-drop, I alighted 
in a deep, limpid stream upon the surface of 
one of its atom- worlds ; it broke my fall, and 
perhaps saved my life. I crawled to the bank, 
and throwing myself upon the soft turf, sought 
to recover my breath and composure. Sud- 
denly my eye caught a gleaming particle at 
my feet — a dew-drop within a dew-drop ; how 
small it was you may barely guess, when you 
reflect that it bore the same proportion to the 
globules of dew you see upon the grass that 
those globules do, not to this immense earth, 
but to the whole visible heavens. I trembled 
lest the angel should appear, and touching me 
— a poor atom — I should be a second time dimin- 
ished into an atom of an atom, and, falling into 
a second drop, I might be lost to myself in com- 
plete annihilation, even as I was already lost 

to mv friends and the outer world. Shudder- 
%i • 

ing at the thought, I looked up into the sky of 



180 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



dewy particles, and although I knew it was all 
contained within a mere drop, yet so complete 
was the illusion, and so perfect the harmony 
of proportion between myself and everything 
else, that I could hardly believe I was not of 
my old gigantic human size, and looking up 
into the same old heavens. And if I were, 
thought I, might I not be laboring under a 
similar illusion ; and may not the sons and 
daughters of Adam have just as arbitrary 
notions of their own size and importance, and 
of the bulk of their earth, and of the sublime 
distances of their stars, as the inhabitants of 
this to them invisible atom- world ? 

I have neither time nor inclination to de- 
scribe the scenes and adventures I passed 
through in my atomic travels, but will merely 
give a few general results of my observations. 
It is sufficient to say that the little globe cor- 
responded in many respects with that greater 
one, upon which its whole surrounding firma- 
ment of microcosms rested in the form of a 
sparkling dew-drop. That which struck me 
most forcibly at first w r as the fact that the 
computation of time upon this terraqueous 
particle, and the length of life enjoyed by its 
inhabitants, corresponded perfectly with the 
size of the atom. An hour with us was a 
thousand years with them, and consequently 
the ten hours of a summer night, during 



A UNIVERSE IN LITTLE — A DEE AM. 181 

which, only, the dew-drop (their universe) 
could exist, would be analagous to the time of 
man's existence, if we suppose that man began, 
say, nine thousand years ago, and that a final 
conflagration is to take place a thousand years 
hence. A year with them was equal to four 
seconds of our time, sixteen years to nearly 
one minute, and the most protracted life, four- 
score years, was completed in just five minutes. 
So inconceivably rapid, however, was the train 
of their thoughts and actions, and so crowded 
with events and enjoyments was their brief 
span of time, that their lives seemed quite as 
long to them as ours to us. They took a 
sound night's rest in the one hundred and 
eightieth part of a second, and I met with 
certain ladies and gentlemen of wealth and 
elegant leisure who complained bitterly of 
dull times and ennui, and who spent nearly all 
their lives in sleep, amusements, or at their 
toilets, the better to kill time and pass away 
long days which, by our computation, were 
only so many small fractions of a second. 
They reached their full stature and maturity 
in one minute from their birth, and were soon 
married, made or lost their fortunes, and in 
four minutes, at the furthest, after they had 
come of age, they sank into the grave with age 
and decrepitude. Their poets, indeed, were 
much given to discoursing upon the frailty 



182 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



and shortness of life, but it was generally 
regarded as weak, innocent cant and common- 
place, for the memories of these ultra-microsco- 
pic beings could recall but little that hap- 
pened a half -minute before (eight of their years) 
and they looked forward, at every age, to a 
long, leisurely life before them. Certainly, 
many of them occupied all of their five-minute 
lives in preparing for and building splendid 
edifices, and cultivating beautiful gardens and 
trees around them, as if they were to enjoy 
them more than one brief moment ; many also 
were hoarding little heaps of gold-dust, every 
particle of which was as much smaller than 
the atom-world itself as a guinea is smaller 
than our massive planet. 

So conformed was I, in mental and physical 
structure, to these little, rational, talking, 
laughing monads, and with such an unconscious 
velocity, corresponding to my size, did my 
thoughts, motions, waking and sleeping frac- 
tions of a second come and go, that at first I 
had great difficulty in keeping the human 
measures of time, and could hardly realize that 
all these events were passing in a summer's 
night. In one thing I differed from them : the 
angel had endowed me with an atomic immor- 
tality, so that I became a great subject of won* 
der to the generation which arose after the on* 
I had first fallen upon. Ail the noted philoso. 



A UNIVERSE IN LITTLE — A DREAM. 183 

phers and doctors, by this time, began to flock 
around me, to know if I had adopted their 
several theories and modes of diet ; and I was 
equally claimed as a living confirmation of 
their systems of practice, by the advocates of 
homeopathy, allopathy, and the water-cure. 
But the third generation of theorizing atomites, 
which arose four minutes after the last had 
died awa} r , took no philosophical notice of me; 
I became an object of superstitious terror, and 
figured largely in novels and romances as a 
sort of haggard "Wandering Jew, who was 
doomed never to die. About this time, for 
another reason, I was imprisoned in a dungeon, 
where I l&y the rest of the night (their thou- 
sands of years) until morning broke and the 
drop exhaled. Before I come to this grand 
catastrophe, one word as to the state of science 
and politics with the inhabitants of this central 
particle of dew. 

At the time of my first arrival, the prevalent 
theory was similar to that of Ptolemy ; they 
supposed that, at a great distance from their 
terraqueous particle — perhaps the thousandth 
part of a hair's breadth — it was surrounded by 
all the other visible particles of the drop, re- 
volving with inconceivable rapidity around the 
central one, and making an inaudible but sub^ 
lime music of the spheres. Some twelve hun- 
dred years after (an hour and twelve minutes 



184 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



with us), a new theory supervened, which made 
the drop stationary, the central particle revolv- 
ing on its axis, and gave to the surrounding 
star-like atoms their true distances. Four hun- 
dred of their years later, instruments were 
constructed which put to flight their long- 
cherished idea that their little spangled globule 
reached outward in all directions invisibly and 
indefinitely, so that the whole universe was 
nothing but that drop infinitely extended, and 
making one interminable ocean of dew. They 
found its shape and bounds, and, moreover, 
discovered thousands of other dew-drops scat- 
tered all around them, which, with their tele- 
scopes, appeared like crowded firmaments of 
suns. This was a sublime advance in their 
knowledge, to be sure ; but unluckily I ven- 
tured to assure them that there is a vast, sub- 
stantial, enduring world around which all those 
clouds of stars were scattered in thick profu- 
sion, like the dew upon their own atom- world ; 
that this invisible world would endure when 
their planet and skies of dew had been exhaled, 
exploded, and " no place found for them ;" that 
the unseen world is filled with mansions, tow- 
ers, palaces, and inhabited by beings as much 
superior to theirs and to them as they and 
their abodes were to any still more minute 
beings and habitations which they might.imag- 
ine to. be contained in a single drop from their 
flowing streams. 



A UNIVERSE itf LITTLE— A DREAM. 185 

All this was received, at first, as a very good 
moon-story or Gulliver's tale ; but when they 
found I was in earnest, they shut me up as a 
poor deluded lunatic. In a little hollow atom 
of a dungeon, having one window grated with 
bars infrangible, yet invisible to a spider's eye, 
did I remain for the rest of the night, although 
to them and myself it seemed several thousand 
years. A king was on the throne when I was 
first confined, and my keepers were continued 
in office during life ; they succeeded each other 
in the freshness of youth, but, one after an- 
other, grew old and gray, and died. Toward 
morning a republic arose in place of the 
monarchy, and then there was a rotation in 
olfice every year — in other words, all public 
officers were ejected every four seconds. 

But I hasten to the final and terrible catas- 
trophe — the conflagration of the atom-world, 
which indeed was nothing more than the rising 
of our sun, and the evaporation of the dew. 
The increasing light of the dawn lit up the 
particles with a luster strange to the inhabit- 
ants of the atom, and unknown in all their 
history, for the drop which formed their vaulted 
heaven of stars had hitherto been only illu- 
mined by moonlight. As the light increased, 
their stars seemed growing in size, and shone 
with almost intolerable splendor, and it was 
generally believed by them that the whole 



186 



THE AGKOSTIC GOSPEL. 



universe was rapidly approaching, as if on all 
sides it had conspired to crush their wicked 
little world. But their philosophers assured 
them that, at the most rapid rate, those stars 
would not reach them in hundreds of years. This 
soon quieted their fears, and they went dancing 
and laughing to their business and recreations. 
But soon there was light enough for them to 
get glimpses of our earth and its scenery, which 
had thus far been dark and viewless, for the 
moonlight only revealed the dew-drops ; they 
grew terrified at the dim blades of grass which 
seemed like long streaming comets of a green 
sulphurous brilliance, and they shouted in 
terror at several moving forms of men, who 
were early going afield, and whose 'heads 
towered far above their utmost sight. Suddenly 
the sun looked over the eastern hills ; they 
could not see its disk, but verily they could 
behold its warm rays, which came darting into 
the dew-drop — that is, their heavens, like 
broad, vivid sheets of lightning, long as the 
universe, and so thick and incessant as almost 
to melt into one vault of blinding fire ! The 
outermost particles of the drop, which just 
before appeared like mighty suns plunging in 
wrath upon the atom-planet, now, as they 
evaporated, seemed to explode in crashing 
thunder and disappear forever. Nearer and 
nearer came the devastation ; one by one— 



A UNIVERSE IN LITTLE— A DREAM. 187 



nay, by hundreds, they were blotted out, and 
their explosions shook the inmost atom of a 
world, where I stood in mute horror. 

The dew-drop skies grew intensely hot. to 
me and the inhabitants of the particle; our 
delicate senses could not endure it, and the 
gentle warmth seemed to us like a furnace 
heated seven-fold. The bars of my dungeon 
hissed to the touch, the walls cracked aloud; 
the keeper hud opened it and fl jd, and I rushed 
out ; horror-struck beings were running to 
and fro, and throwing away the gold to which 
they had frantically clung, for it blistered in 
their grasp; the streams simmered and went 
up in vapor ; forests and cities took fire and 
burned to heaven ; two armies, that a moment 
before were at the crisis of hat tie, tore off 
their scorching armor, and fell into each 
other's arms; some howled in agony, others 
fainte 1, and all aroan I lay pallid corpses, 
whose distorted faces stoo l out ghastly in the 
quivering lightning. Loader boomed the crash 
of worlds, and the atom-planet on which I 
stood seemed just ready to explode, when— I 
awoke ! 

My dream was over; the noise and largo 
pattering drops of a thunder-storm had 
awakened me. I sought shelter in my room, 
impressed anew with the thought that size, 
distance, time, are illusive and of little real 



188 



THE AGKOSTIC GOSPEL. 



account. To celestial beings our lives may 
seem but a moment — time but a summer's 
night ; to the angel who shall stand upon the 
land and sea, lifting his awful form to the 
skies, our visible heaven may seem but a dew- 
drop, and its rolling together as a scroll, if it 
is literally to pass away, but as the exhalation 
of the nightly distilled diamond of the grass. 
Then, too, the great invisible world may stand 
forth in its resplendent reality, like earth to 
the affrighted atoms, under the rising sun of 
eternity. 

But will there be time at all, or, since that is 
metaphysical, will there be a consciousness of 
time, in eternity ? Out in a sail-boat, running 
against the wind, with the waves coursing by, 
especially if we are near the shore or sighting 
any landmarks, we realize progress ; but when 
we run before the wind, far from land, with 
only the blue dome above and the green water 
below, we seem to stand still. So may it be 
when we glide out into the ocean of eternity, 
away from all the signs and affairs of time. 
The present indices of time we cannot suppose 
to continue for us in the next life — rising and 
setting suns, clocks and watches, hunger and 
w T eariness, growth and decay. Here and now, 
if everything external and everything internal 
(such as bodily conditions and habitual rate of 
thought) that measure duration were to cease, 



A UNIVERSE m LITTLE — A DREAM. 189 

a day would become to us as a thousand years 
and a thousand years as a day. 

In the little anonymous book, "The Stars 
and the Earth," now out of print, are some 
wonderful illustrations of the illusiveness of 
time. We see objects by the colored and 
shaded rays of light reflected from them. 
These rays are traveling out from earth into 
space, proceeding onward forever. If one 
could start from some inconceivably distant 
point and fly to earth in one moment, he 
would meet the rays that have been reflected 
from the earth in thousands of years, in the 
order of emission, and thus actually behold all 
the objects and events in those thousands of 
years in one moment. If the rate of move- 
ment and change of everything, personal, ter- 
restrial, celestial, were either quickened or 
retarded a thousand times the present seeming 
rate, we should not know the difference ; all 
standards of comparison would partake of the 
change. In the recently invented kinetograph, 
there is a similar suggestion as to rate and 
time. 

But, in our own experience, time may be- 
come of small or no account. We have been 
deeply interested in something, and the hours 
have struck in surprisingly quick succession. 
A whole day has passed in absorbing work, 
and we exclaimed, "What has become of this 



190 THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 

day ?" When a great grief or joy came to us- 
we took no note of time. Thus, far more, 
ma}^ all thought of time be swallowed up in 
the joy of the perfect life hereafter, or in the 
endless death. Lessing said : " It must be a 
great ennui to live forever." Yes, if the soul 
has not come to live out of itself in a great 
ever-inspiring Person and object, losing itself 
in the Divine glory ; and yes, if eternal life 
and death are simply duration rather than 
spiritual states. This is eternal life, even here, 
to know God and Jesus Christ whom he hath 
sent. Our hymn-makers have risen to the 
truth that, in the greater life, " days and years 
revolve no more " — " time will be no more,'' 
and 

4 ' Beyond this vale of tears, 
There is a life above, 
Unmeasured by the flight of years, 
And all that life is love." 



THE KNOW-NOTHING PHILOSOPHERS. 191 



VI. 

THE KNOW-NOTHING PHILOSOPHERS. 

Philosophical agnosticism was dismissed in 
the foregoing review of Huxley as something 
foreign to his range of thought and remark. 
There is an agnostic gospel of the metaphysi- 
cians, often underlying that of a scientific 
Philistine or adopted by him without troubling 
himself about metaphysics. 

It is founded usually on sensationism — the 
doctrine that all our knowledge is derived from 
the senses. It takes the shape of phenomenon- 
alism — that we know nothing of the supersen- 
suous, nothing beyond appearances. In psy- 
chology it teaches that we have no knowledge 
of what the mind is, only of a succession of 
. states of consciousness (its favorite phrase), as 
if these were all ; and a special fad among the 
psycho-physiologists is not only to ignore but 
even scout the idea of an ego, a soul. More 
widely, it ignores any substratum of the 
universe, material, spiritual, or Divine. In a 
strictly metaphysical form (ontological) it 
may or may not be connected with sensation- 
ism; it talks of things in themselves as 



192 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



unknowable, insisting that we can only cognize 
relations of things to each other and to our 
apprehension, and hence really know nothing 
of existences. In any form, it is fond of 
speaking of God as unthinkable, inconceivable, 
unknowable, unrepresentable to our minds. 
Under the name of nescience, it may either 
assert that we do not know, or it may go 
further and say that we cannot know, anything 
of being a? such. 

A prolonged study of the history of philos- 
ophy is necessary if one would understand 
well the subject thus referred to. It is in place 
here to make only a few running remarks for 
the general reader. 

The know-nothing philosophers say that the 
infinite, the absolute, the unconditioned are 
merely negative words — the not-limited, the 
not-dependent, the not-conditioned, meaning 
nothing real and positive. But a negative 
word may mean much. Independence is a 
.negative word — the not-dependent; and when 
: our forefathers fought for it, they were not 
fighting for nothing, but for something very 
real and important. When a tribe of savage 
islanders first saw an ox, and named it the 
" not-dog," it was a substantial ox nevertheless. 

We are told that we get our idea of the in- 
finite or absolute by thinking away all limita- 
tion, removing it and leaving nothing, or at 



THE KNOW-NOTHING PHILOSOPHERS. 193" 

least by the vain attempt to do so until we tire 
of the effort to reach the boundless; and thus, 
we are even told, our idea is the product of 
our weakness, our imbecility. But, the truth 
is, all this is a vain attempt to imagine the 
infinite — to make it an imageable thing, 
bounded by lines, and then to expunge these 
or push them out more widely — to magnify 
something endlessly. We are so prone or so 
constituted to think of all realities under the 
forms of sense and imagination that we are all 
liable to this mistake. Do we think of space 
as an area whose bounds we remove or en- 
large? If so, we are not thinking pure space, 
but of a figure in it. Do we think of God in 
the same way? We are only attempting to 
figure His infinitude, which is impossible and 
absurd. Yet, the nescient philosophers, down 
to this day, are continually saying that God 
(and much besides) is unthinkable, incon- 
ceivable — betraying their fallacy by also say- 
ing we " cannot represent it to ourselves." A 
God that, as God, could be represented is no 
God. We cannot even conceive our own finite 
minds in any such sense. Herbert Spencer is 
sure we cannot know God as self-existent, 
infinite, and eternal ; but he apparently has no 
difficulty in conceiving matter and force as 
such. 

We are further informed that to think any- 



194 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



thing about the infinite is to think that it is 
one thing and not another, and hence to limit 
it — that, to regard God as having any qualities, 
attributes, or as related to himself, to his acts, 
or to his universe, is to restrict him, to " con- 
dition " him, as the term is, because to be or 
have this or that is not to be or not to have 
something else. This is the metaphysical God 
of the nescientists. Certainly, we know nothing 
about such a God. If a being have no attri- 
butes, nothing that can be thought, affirmed, 
or denied in regard to it, then it is nothing. 
As one has said, it is pure, absolute, uncon- 
ditioned nonsense. They are welcome to it. 
But it is not philosophical. The absolute does 
not exclude all properties and relations ; it only 
excludes those which are opposed to the idea 
itself, such as dependence, derived existence, 
limited degree. It does not exclude being, 
wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and 
truth. Infinite Space does not require us to 
attribute nothing, think nothing, for it must 
be different from infinite Time. We can deny 
that to it ; we can affirm something of it — that 
it is that in which forms are projected. 

But, the metaphysical nihilists declare, we 
have no knowledge of anything in itself, apart 
from phenomena and apart from our modes of 
perceiving and thinking. Well, who wants to ? 
Who wants to know copper or cobalt apart 



THE KNOW-NOTHING PHILOSOPHERS. 195 

from gravity, form, color, all physical and 
chemical properties, all uses, all manifestations 
of itself ? What is matter or mind to us aside 
from its attributes ? What is the Most High to 
us without any revelation or manifestation of 
himself and his perfections ? To all intents 
and purposes, the attributes of anything con- 
stitute itself. Moreover, could any being or 
thing be known at all except by some indica- 
tion of itself to soul or sense ? What a waste 
of words to tell us that anything can be known 
only in the ways in which it can be known — 
an identical proposition that the writer of this 
added to a definition of one phase of nescience 
in a recent dictionary. 

And what is the use of assuring us that a 
thing is known to us only according to the na- 
ture of our cognitive faculties % — that it might 
be differently cognized by different beings — 
that knowledge is relative, not absolute ? It 
all amounts to this very wise discovery, that 
there cannot be knowing without a knower, 
and the knower knows according to his know- 
ing power. That is no news, nor a very 
profound philosophy. A = A ; 2 = 2. To 
know Saturn's rings through a telescope does 
not cheapen or invalidate the knowledge, pro- 
vided the telescope be well made and errors 
are duly guarded against. To cognize a truth 
by a cognizing faculty does not hurt the cog- 



196 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEI 



nition, and aJone gives the cognition. If our 
faculties tell us lies or but half-truths, we must 
depend on these same faculties to detect the 
error. And, if man be made in the image of 
God, with Divine endowments — capable of 
knowing and akin to God — there is no reason 
why man should not have a true knowledge of 
God, so far as the knowledge goes. "VTe have 
not a complete knowledge of the practically 
boundless and inexhaustible universe ; but, be- 
cause of this, no man of science would contemn 
his knowledge as worthless. 

And, if the infinite be unthinkable, what are 
the nescient philosophers talking about ? Even 
Herbert Spencer admits the force of such a 
query. He remarks : " To say that we cannot 
know the Absolute, is, by implication, to affirm 
that there is an Absolute." He only claims 
that we cannot know what it is. Certainly 
not its verv essence, known onlv to God him- 
self. 

But we may go further and claim that our 
knowledge of the Infinite and Eternal is found- 
ed on the most fundamental and certain of 
all our knowledge. Intellectually, we know 
in two ways, by intuition and by inference — 
even our sense-knowledge being inferential, as 
abundantly proved by experiments in physio- 
logical psychology. Intuitively, we have ideas 
of space, time, cause, right, free will, etc., in- 



THE KNOW-NOTHING PHILOSOPHERS. 197 

eluding the uniformity of nature (for example, 
if this fire burns, that will also), presupposed 
in all experience, necessary to experience, not 
the result of it. As primary ideas and laws of 
thought, they are the most certain of all things. 
And these ideas involve the great First Cause 
and its perfections. Take the order of nature — 
that it works not by chance but by method, a 
rational method, one akin to our rationality, 
and that may be anticipated, tested, known by 
our reason. This alone involves the truth of 
a creative and governing Eeason, the greatest 
and truest of truths. The ideas that [center 
in God are at the foundation of all our knowl- 
edge. 

True, our knowledge of Him is obscured by 
ignorance and sin. And this is why he has 
revealed Himself, not only in nature, history, 
and the soul, but in the glorious Gospel of his 
Son. And this is the reason that Paul stood 
up at Athens and said of the altar to the 
" Unknown God " — not as Sir William Hamil- 
ton foolishly said, it is " the last and highest 
consecration of all true religion" — but in 
memorable words that sound on forever, 
" Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him 
declare I unto you — God that made the world, 
and all things therein," and taught that men 
"should seek the Lord, if haply they might 
feel after him and find him, though he be not 



198 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



far from every one of us, for in him we live, 
and move, and have our being." And a greater 
than Paul said, "Blessed are the pure in 
heart, for they shall see God," and " He that 
hath seen me hath seen the Father." 



SOME MORAL ADJUSTMENTS. 199 



VII. 

SOME MORAL ADJUSTMENTS. 

On a previous page is a note mentioning the 
Hebrew legend that, when Moses was writing 
the words " Let us make man in our image," he 
demurred at the plural as open to miscon- 
struction in respect to the Divine unity ; but 
the Lord answered him, "If any man love to 
err, let him err." The note referred to Canon 
Cheyne's mention of this misconstruction of 
the sacred text in a way implying that it really 
has enough weight to be worth repeating. 

Many must have remarked that seemingly 
in everything the universe has left the way 
open to perversion, if men choose to pervert, 
so that no one is forced to act or to believe in 
the right direction, contrary to the great 
principle of freedom. Enough is intelligible 
and decisive in the right way, if one will take 
in the whole given case, but he is at liberty to 
prefer and follow the wrong road in intellectual 
and spiritual as well as in moral matters. 

And the adjustment of pros and cons often 
seems to be very nice, in order that men may 
be obliged to exercise care, discrimination, 



200 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



comprehension, and to the further and higher 
end that they may test and discipline them- 
selves and be tested. Has this wonderful 
nicety been considered ? Xot that the Creator 
exercised anything like a special and human 
calculation in this regard, but the very nature 
of things, proceeding from him, involved this 
and all other arrangements. 

That there may be such an adjustment with 
reference to human care and choice, is illus- 
trated alike by common and by extraordinary 
facts in nature, such as those that exhibit an 
exactly adjusted coordination of things not of 
the sort that might be explained as due to 
evolutionary interaction or to self-adjustment. 
Who has not noticed, for instance, that sun- 
light creeps up or down the wall of a room 
precisely so slow that the movement is not 
directly observable, yet so fast that one won- 
ders to see that momently it has moved before 
his ven T eyes without his detection of the 
motion itself ? — as if it were purposed that he 
should not be disturbed by seeing the motion, 
while at the same time he is every moment 
warned of the flight of time by the stages of 
continuous progress of the light and the follow- 
ing shadow. 

A more extensive illustration is a fact about 
which Huxley argues in one of the volumes 
reviewed. He is replying indignantly to the 



SOME MORAL ADJUSTMENTS. 201 



Duke of Argyll, who had affirmed that men of 
science had sought to suppress Murray's new 
theory of the formation of coral reefs, namely, 
growth of the reef on one side and solution of 
it on the other — the alleged suppression being- 
attributed to worship of Darwin's theory that 
the facts of coral reefs and islands imply a 
continuous subsidence of peaks and ridges — in 
atolls quite submerged. No better example of 
nice adjustment in nature could be found, of 
the kind due to no interaction of the things 
adjusted. The coral-polyps cannot live at a 
greater depth than one hundred or one hun- 
dred and twenty feet. Hence for many ages 
and over the vast area of the Pacific there has 
been a continuous subsidence, just slow enough 
and just fast enough for the polyps to live and 
secrete coral within the comparatively slight 
depth of that hundred feet. The annual 
growth upward of the reef is very small, and 
the depth of the reefs reaches in some in- 
stances thousands of feet. 

Coming to the intellectual world, how per- 
fect are the arrangements for free opinion and 
choice. For example, how precisely does much 
that we know seem to admit of a materialistic 
or pantheistic view, and at the same time give 
a balance in favor of a theistic belief when all 
things are taken into careful account. The 
adjustment is so nice that one who takes in all 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



the considerations, is familiar with them, and is 
well established in Bible faith, must, if he thinks 
much of these subjects and on all sides, keep 
constantly in mind the reasons that counterbal- 
ance the temptations to doubt. How narrow 
the line to a careless apprehension between a 
God immanent in the universe and a God con- 
founded with it and lost in its forces ! How 
difficult, when we ponder upon it, to conceive 
of a consciousness, reason, and will independent 
of an organism like or analagous to our own ; 
and thus how hard it is at times to hold firmly 
to the Divine personality, and even to man's 
immortality. It may be only by keeping 
steadily in view the reason and righteousness 
in the universe, or by assuring ourselves that 
the created stream cannot have perfections 
that are not also in the Creative Source, that 
we can save ourselves from sinking God in the 
universe. With the reasons for man's immortal 
nature most persons are more familiar, yet 
alike for this and for the Divine personality, a 
believer may often be reduced to the one 
sufficient support — the Revelation of God and 
immortality in Christ ; he may find himself 
otherwise too perplexed. 

In regard to the agnostic attitude, in a sense 
higher than Huxley's mere call for forensic 
proof of facts, how closely does the acknowl- 
edged truth that we know very little, at best, 



SOME MORAL ADJUSTMENTS. 



203 



come to the error that we in effect know 
nothing of the great realities behind the veil. 
We may need to fortify ourselves often with 
arguments for the unseen, or, dismissing all, 
stand firmly and only on the truth of " God 
manifest in the flesh and received up into 
glory." And even here, raising no question 
about incarnation, resurrection, and ascension, 
we may have to fix our eyes steadfastly on 
" His glory, the glory of the only-begotten of 
the Father, full of grace and truth." 

Turning the leaves of the Bible, how easy, 
as we have seen, to get up a conflict of science 
with the inspired teachings, such that it may 
require careful examination to show that there 
is no ground for such conflict. Or how readily 
can one invent and apply almost any little 
theory to the sacred books as other than what 
they purport to be, especially when evolution, 
apparently valid in the physical and organic 
world, has become a fashion in treating of the 
history and arts of man, even of our national 
flag or of a simple machine. Keadily, too, 
under the borrowed name of the higher crit- 
icism (which has its proper place and work as 
distinguished from textual) can every one, in 
his own ingenious way, disintegrate the Scrip- 
tures as well as anything else in literature, 
overlooking the grand Divine impress on the 
sacred book. 



204 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL, 



It is even quite supposable that the Provi- 
dence and the Spirit that brought that volume 
to pass purposed that it should not in every 
part, from beginning to end, be such a smooth 
road that even those who choose to stumble 
could find no stumbling-stone, or at least in- 
tended that some things in it should exact 
careful and candid examination and other 
things demand a docile and valiant faith to 
accept. We all know what those things are, 
for objectors of every sort, from the learned 
skeptic down to the bar-room mouther, have 
them always at their tongue's end ; aad all 
persons who will can find the explanations or 
justifying considerations that have been set 
forth by those who have made the Scriptures 
a reverent study. 

It is no wonder that the half-educated stum- 
ble about in this as in other intellectual mat- 
ters. Ordinarily, they cannot hold their minds 
to one thing until they have fathomed it, and 
their knowledge is a fragmentary jumble ; in 
most instances they have settled no question, 
no truth, no principle of judgment, firmly and 
forever ; and, if they are anchored at all in 
religion, it is by inheritance or directly by the 
Christian hope and faith. But, the highly ed- 
ucated have no excuse for not giving what time 
they may to serious, candid, real study of that 



SOME MORAL ADJUSTMENTS. 205 



which is by common consent the greatest and 
best of books, availing themselves of the stud- 
ies of those who have made it their special 
work not so much to dissect the text as to 
know what is " the mind of the Spirit/' such 
as the greatest and most spiritual of the mod- 
ern commentators. And what excuse is there 
for the highly educated who read the Bible 
only in the captious spirit that is evinced by 
their speech or writings, and are turning away 
others, especially their weak fellow-men, from 
that which multitudes, high and low, have 
found to be a fountain of light and life % What 
was the woe pronounced by the Savior on 
those who cause the weak to stumble ? 

The same train of thought might be carried 
into morals. It is easy to pervert nature as 
well as Scripture. Things are so adjusted that 
a man may take one view or another as he 
chooses, and follow the one to a bitter or the 
other to a glorious end. If any man love to 
err, let him err. JS~o one is compelled to see 
and follow the right. So far as we can see it 
was a purpose in the creation of intelligent 
beings that they shall have their own opinion 
and their own way now and forever — yes, that 
it is involved in rational intelligence itself and 
the power of choice. " He that is unjust, let 
him be unjust still ; and he which is filthy, let 



THE AGXOSTIC GOSPEL. 



him be filthy still ; and he that is righteous, 
let him be righteous still; and he that is holy, 
let him be holy still." And they who take the 
wrong road would be the first to complain if 
it Mf<>re not so. 



THE CHRISTIANS AGNOSTICISM AND GNOSIS. 20? 



VIII. 

THE CHRISTIAN'S AGNOSTICISM AND 
GNOSIS. 

Speculation as well as criticism aside, we 
turn to problems and experiences that come 
home to the individual Christian. A good 
many know-nots, and as many knows (gnosis, 
knowledge, but not gnosticism), could be found 
in the Christian's ripe experience as well as in 
the language of the Bible. But, to him all is 
summed up in Christ, " whom, having not seen, 
we love, and in whom, though now we see 
him not, yet believing, we rejoice with joy 
unspeakable and full of glory." This is the 
supreme knowledge by faith and love ; it was 
the patriarch's " I know that my Eedeemer 
liveth," and Paul's "I know whom I have 
believed." On this the apostle soared to his 
sublimest heights, as when he prayed that the 
Ephesians might comprehend with all saints 
what is the breadth, and length, and depth, 
and height, and to know the love of Christ, 
which passeth all knowledge, that they might 
be rilled with all the fullness of God. 



208 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



A glowing devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ, 
as a great unseen presence, an indwelling and 
all-inspiring reality, has been the life and 
power of the Christian religion in its purity, 
from primitive times to our own. It beamed 
forth in the midst of superstition. St. Catherine 
of Genoa sought to verify the words " I live ; 
yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." Thomas a 
Kern pis speaks of the love of Jesus as above 
all things and of the familiar converse we may 
have with him. The zealous Loyola named 
his order the Society of Jesus. And the 
multitudes now of every name, who make the 
"Word of God their daily food, are those who 
know and sing the love of Christ. 

It is just that highest, mightiest motive 
which all need — a personal love, surpassing 
all abstract devotion and lifting us at once out 
of our poor selves — yes, raising us at once to 
the highest object, him who is the brightness 
of the Father's glory, and at the same time the 
ideal man. It has a living power not to be 
found in contemplation of deity as such or 
humanity as such ; it embodies and unites the 
two, so that in devotion to Christ we are 
devoted to both God and-, man, and this is 
reason enough for the Incarnation ; and it 
quickens this piety and humanity by intense 
sympathy with the filial, humane, sympathetic 
Son of God himself. It enlists, too, all the 



THE CHRISTIAN'S AGNOSTICISM AND GNOSIS. 209 

powers of our nature, for he who is the Truth, 
the Right, the incarnate Love, the Ideal, 
addresses all the high elements of our being. 
It is the personal regard that has no dangerous 
extreme, as Thomas Arnold explained, for it 
finds in Christ the concord and balance of all 
virtues and graces ; and so it is the one grand 
molding and perfecting power. And, as it 
sustained the early martyrs to their last 
breath, voiced in their outcry, "None but 
Christ — none but Christ!" so it is ever the 
one unfailing strength and inspiration. No 
wonder that in the apostle Paul it repeatedly 
shows itself as a great gathering tidal wave, 
rolling through long passages of eloquence 
and piling up in volume, power, and splendor, 
to the utmost of expression, as in the outburst 
that begins " Who shall separate us from the 
love of Christ ?" That sacred name, in the 
Christian's experience, grows in brightness 
and might until it comes to be the one word 
that always has power to restrain, to subdue, 
to melt, to kindle, to vivify, to uplift, to incite, 
to impel. This is life eternal to know the only 
true God and Jesus Christ whom he hath 
sent. 

In comparison with this knowing, of w T hat 
account is it that we know so little of the 
great Beyond ? — though the little is much — a 
spiritual body, and an abode of some sort com- 



210 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



parable to a Fathers house of many mansions, 
together with the society of Jesus and the 
blessed. "What we do not further know and 
what we further do know is summed up in 
the remarkable words : " It doth not yet appear 
what we shall be, but we know that, when he 
shall appear, we shall be like him, for we shall 
see him as he is." 

Is this too much to know ? Is it incredible 
that all our conscious imperfection and un- 
worthiness shall then be removed as dross and 
the likeness to Christ be made complete? 
Even here, " with open face beholding as in a 
glass the glory of the Lord, we are changed 
into the same image from glory to glory " — if 
only we behold. There are those whose faces 
in life and in death begin to shine with that 
reflection, the light of the Lord. The final 
transfiguration of the soul is not too much to 
hope ; it is promised in the Xew Testament, 
and even affirmed by the penitent Psalmist — 
" As for me, I will behold thy face in right- 
eousness : I shall be satisfied, when I awake, I 
with thy likeness." When Jesus appeared to 
his poor, stumbling disciples as the risen Lord, 
and when he ascended into glory, what a sud- 
den and wonderful transformation came over 
them — no longer his weak, blind followers, 
but henceforth his radiant, heroic apostles — a 



THE CHRISTIAN'S AGNOSTICISM AND GNOSIS. 211 

change that no agnostic unbelief, in these 
times, can account for. 

If we hesitate to say " we know we shall be 
like him, for we shall see him as he is " in his 
full spiritual glory, we may somewhat assure 
ourselves by the effects of literal sight in many 
earthly experiences. All true seeing tends to 
transform, in some sense. We look upon the 
ocean, for the first time or repeatedly, with 
souls open to receive the mighty impression ; 
there is the solemn boundless blue, with its sol- 
emn sound and awful associations ; our being 
expands to comprehend the glorious mirror of 
eternity, of God ; and we turn away at last, 
never to be as if the profound impression had 
not been received. An image and idea of the 
infinite remain, and long after, to life's end, 
" though inland far we be, our souls have sight 
of that immortal sea." So when we stand be- 
fore a great cataract, as if before a throne of 
the Eternal ; there are the emerald and sap- 
phire, the cloud of incense, the white wings in 
motion, the rainbow round about the throne, 
and the thunderings and voices of many waters ; 
and the impression shines on and sounds on in 
the memory forever as a symbol of heaventy 
vision. Looking from a high mountain, how 
the busy world falls away and fades — how near 
we seem to God, and how his greatness weighs 



212 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



upon the thoughtful mind. If these works of 
God, ocean, cataract, mountain, so exalt and 
expand a reflective soul, how may not the 
Christian be wrought upon by the presence of 
the glorified One in his spiritual greatness % 

Even the slightest things may work wonders 
in one prepared to see them. An American 
sculptor grew up in the backwoods of Maine ; 
he came to a city and saw in a shop-window a 
cheap plaster-cast copy of sculpture ; from that 
moment he was another being ; the bud of 
genius burst into sudden flower. More than 
one youth has in due time glanced at a piece 
of mechanism, and from that moment become 
an inventor, dropping his past trivial thoughts 
and diversions, and springing at once into new 
power. Since a first sight of that which is less 
than the glories of nature may effect such 
changes, to what spiritual height may the be- 
liever tower when he beholds the spiritual 
world and Him who is its light ! 

We shall " see Him as he is" — no more with 
narrow and distorted vision, no more with 
rudimental eyes, no more in the fragmentary 
lights of Scripture and Providence, and in 
earthly experiences and glints of circumstance, 
and no longer in our " little systems " that are 
but " broken lights of Thee." And will not the 
soul then feel and say, Is this the adorable One 
pf whom or whose principles I was sometimes 



THE CHRISTIANS AGNOSTICISM AND GNOSIS. 213 

ashamed, against whom I sinned, whom I 
served so poorly ? Will not a whole-souled 
devotion flame up in the heart forever ? Then 
we shall see how faithful he has been to us in 
all our waywardness and wandering; we shall 
see his faithfulnes, in the words of the Psalm, 
as reaching unto the clouds, his righteousness 
as the great mountains, his judgments as a 
great deep, and shall say, how excellent is thy 
loving kindness — in thy light we see light ! 
Will not his purity strike through the penitent 
soul and consume all remaining unholiness ? 
Will not his felt wisdom raise the spirit above 
all groveling? Will not his love bathe the 
soul, and so fill the soul as to leave no place for 
sin and folly? Christians are often erring 
because they do not appreciate the whole 
character of Christ. And now, when they see 
him in some fresh light, what a new impulse it 
gives, what a balance of feeling it restores. 
When we are no more children, tossed to and 
fro, in this distracting life, and come into full 
knowledge of the Son of God, will it not be 
" unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the 
stature of the fullness of Christ"? 

The visible presence itself of the Lord in his 
glory may secure sinless exaltation in those 
who have not seen him on earth and yet have 
believed. There is that in the sight of a person 
who embodies a great principle that brings it 



214 



THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



home to us with power, and almost lifts us to 
his level for the time. There is a magical 
power in presence ; when a hero comes, it is 
well said, all men become heroes. There is 
often a strange power in presence, aside from 
special quality shown ; we feel absorbed into 
the being of some whom we meet. There is a 
silent and mighty influence that radiates from 
a great and good character — even a kind of 
effluence from the evil. Infinitely greater will 
be this radiation of influence from Him who 
alone is good and great, and from whom flow 
ever the waves of the Holy Spirit — that Breath 
which he breathed on his disciples, a sanctifying 
and empowering impartation. 

Practically, there is one expression, some- 
times heard, which may go far to confirm the 
great expectation. It is the heartfelt words, 
" Oh, I see it all now !" A man has been 
averse or indifferent to a good cause ; but light 
breaks in upon him, and with noble confession 
and new zeal he exclaims : "Oh, I see it all at 
last — how erring my course — how Divine is 
this cause." A person opposes or neglects a 
dear friend ; but at last the guilty mistake is 
seen, and tenderly comes the acknowledgment : 
" Oh, I see it all now — how perverse I have 
been — how good and patient you have been." 
And may not the seeing of the Lord as he is 
be largely the seeing of ourselves as we have 



THE CHRISTIAN'S AGNOSTICISM AND GNOSIS. 215 

been, in his gracious light ? Shall we not say, 
" Oh, I understand all now — how apathetic, 
how sinful, I have been — how needlessly imper- 
fect my love and service" ? And will not the 
seeing of all we have been, in that Divine light, 
become the being of all we should be ? 

There is an expression, too, not in words 
but of face — the face of the dead — that suggests 
the great spiritual transformation on the 
threshold of the everlasting. Who has not 
seen it — a look as if the closed eyes were gaz- 
ing in holy, happy awe on the vision of God 
himself? — a heavenly look of perfectness. 
Blessed are they whose life and death do not 
belie that expression — blessed, whose Christian 
life renders it a consolation and a revelation. 
To see nature, it must be mirrored in the eye ; 
to see God he must be mirrored in the heart 
and life. Blessed are the pure in heart, for 
they shall see God. 

If Christ were to come, not to this or that 
jcity, but to us all in the literal sense that some 
'look for him, who that loves him would not 
welcome him, though with felt unworthiness 
and trembling joy ; and would not our sins 
and follies drop from us in his presence, and 
our souls be lifted to perfect oneness with 
him? Enough that some time, somewhere, 
we shall see him as he is. And enough that 
he stands at the door, and if an} T hear his 



216 THE AGNOSTIC GOSPEL. 



voice and open the door, he will come in to 
them, and make his abode with them. With 
him as the perpetual heavenly Guest, all 
doubts, all denials or trials of our faith, are as 
idle winds that have no entrance to the 
illumined heart, no place by its fireside, no 
power to give a flicker to its flame. We 
know whom we have believed. 



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